Egypt's eFinance to increase shares listed on EGX after high demand
eFinance for Digital and Financial Investments, Egypt’s first fintech platform and one of its leading developers for digital payment infrastructures announced on Monday that it has increased the shares that it intends to list on the Egyptian Stock Exchange (EGX) under Egypt’s initial public offering (IPO) program.
eFinance will be raising the shares by 26.1 percent of the group’s total shares, offering 417.7 million shares, up from 257.7 million, according to a request the group submitted to the Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA). The group explained in its request that the increase is due to the high demand for the offered shares under the subscription process eFinance initiated last Monday. The FRA has said that it has no objection to increasing the offered shares. eFinance's offering includes a primary issue and sale of up to 177,777,778 ordinary shares on the EGX in addition to a secondary sale by existing shareholders of up to 80 million existing ordinary shares on the EGX. the IPO offering is set for 18 October.
The group’s revenues grew by a compound annual growth rate of 30 percent between 2018 and 2020 to record EGP 1.2 million for 2020 and EGP 904 million for the first half of 2021. Besides being the operator of the government’s financial network through its primary subsidiary eFinance for Digital Operations, the group is also a leader in digital payments, with the largest ecosystem of bill aggregators in Egypt.
eFinance’s ‘eKhales’ platform is a central bill processing hub for 13 partners through a network of more than 326,000 point-of-sale machines, in addition to its digital channels, including a mobile app and an online bill payment portal. Furthermore, eFinance is the owner and operator of eAswaaq — the group’s latest venture in the e-commerce space — a digital purchasing platform with over 300,000 merchants specializing in agriculture, commerce, industry, and tourism. eFinance also owns a business process outsourcing (BPO) company called enable, which provides solutions from human resources and information technology outsourcing to full contact center services, fielding more than 1.5 million calls per month.
The group’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization grew by 35 percent to EGP 465 million. eFinance is the second state-owned company to list its shares under Egypt’s IPO program after the successful offering of the Eastern Company for Tobacco in 2019.