Petr Kellner’s PPF Group has selected banks to help it explore a potential listing of its telecommunications company Cetin, Bloomberg reports.
PPF is working with BNP Paribas, Morgan Stanley, and Société Générale to examine options for Cetin, including the primary issue of shares. The transaction could value Cetin at about four billion euros (over one hundred billion crowns). Since last July, Cetin has also included infrastructure separate from Bulgaria, Hungary, and Serbia operators.
“PPF is also considering Cetin’s IPO as one of the options. However, the questions about the IPO process itself are completely premature at the moment, “says PPF spokeswoman Jitka Tkadlecová, adding that considerations about the issue certainly do not mean that the group is leaving the telecommunications business. “We consider the investment in Cetin to be long-term and strategic,” adds Tkadlecová.
In any case, he wishes the time when the new title will enter the stock exchange. Last year, markets experienced a boom in new stock issuances in the US and China, with corporate valuations reaching very high levels.
US companies listed a record $175 billion for equity, according to Bloomberg. Companies entered the stock exchange as an intermediary for accommodation services Airbnb, a company Palantir focusing on processing large amounts of data, the cloud company Snowflake or, for example, DoorDash, which delivers food.
If Cetin went public, he would return to the capital markets after six years. In 2015, the PPF Group ousted the small shareholders of Cetina, which was formed by a breakaway from the telecommunications company O2. Kellner’s group bought a majority stake in O2 from Spanish Phone in early 2014.
Cetin is currently an infrastructure company that operates over 44,000 kilometers of optical cables and manages the mobile network.