This year has brought some tentative optimism from investors linked to easing inflation and Chinese reopening. Corporate confidence is gradually recovering after the invasion of Ukraine brought fundraisings to a halt, with businesses beginning to tap the market for growth capital again.

In this article, we outline why the year ahead should see a rebound in equity fundraisings and explain how retail investors can get involved, often at attractive share price discounts.

SHARE-BASED FUNDRAISINGS ARE BACK

2020 and 2021 were bumper years for fundraisings on the London Stock Exchange; 2020 because the onset of the pandemic and lockdowns meant companies needed cash to shore-up balance sheets, 2021 as companies sought fresh funds to capitalise on an anticipated post-Covid recovery that was derailed by inflation and the Ukraine conflict.

After a subdued 2022, investment bankers are sharpening their pencils for an uptick in fundraisings this year. And given higher interest rates, companies are looking to raise equity rather than borrow to fund growth.

Oliver Brown is manager of IFSL RC Brown UK Primary Opportunities (B905T77), a multi-cap fund that seeks to buy quality, typically dividend-paying companies when they raise money through placings or initial public offerings (IPOs). He recalls there were no big IPOs in 2022 and the last quarter was ‘as quiet as it has probably ever been in my career’.

Yet he sees ‘more positivity on the outlook’ this year and believes there are ‘plenty of good companies out there that will be seeking fresh capital in order to expand’, with a smaller contingent wanting to protect and repair balance sheets. ‘I would expect fundraising to grow throughout the year,’ he adds.

‘I think it will be back to a more normal year, over the £20 billion mark,’ he explains.

WHY EQUITY TRUMPS DEBT

RC Brown UK Primary Opportunities has invested in placings this year by US natural gas producer Diversified Energy (DEC), which raised £134.9 million at 105p, a 5.2% discount to the prevailing market price and 3i Infrastructure (3IN), the investment trust which raked in £100 million at 330p, a 3.4% discount.

The fund has also supported quarried materials group SigmaRoc (SRC:AIM), which raised £30 million at 54p, a 1.8% premium to the 53p market price, which it will use to acquire quarries and fund organic growth and carbon footprint reduction projects. Oliver Brown believes it is significant that SigmaRoc raised £30 million in equity and £10 million in debt for acquisitions.

‘Because the cost of debt has gone up, issuing equity is now more attractive than it was. More than ever, investors are very hot on how much debt a company has,’ says Brown. ‘We tend to buy into companies at the stage when they are raising money, so the fact that debt is reasonably more expensive and equity has become reasonably more attractive, and investors are less prepared to tolerate as much debt in businesses, means you are going to see equity raises.’

TRYING TO CREATE A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

Public markets were created to allow everyone to invest in companies they believe in, but retail investors have been missing out on valuable share offers for decades as the technology wasn’t available to enable retail inclusion at scale. Increasingly however, retail investors are being offered a chance to buy shares when companies raise money through IPOs or at a discount through share placings.

This level playing field has long been desired by smaller investors, who now have a regulatory tailwind at their back following the UK Government’s Secondary Capital Raising Review (July 2022), which recommended that companies should give due consideration to including their retail shareholders in all capital raises as fully as possible.

Fundraising platform PrimaryBid enables individuals to invest in IPOs, placings and other deals, while the similar REX platform owned by broker Peel Hunt allows retail investors to participate in IPOs and fundraisings conducted as accelerated book-builds. REX is set to become a standalone business branded ‘RetailBook’ in the second half of this year.

WHAT ARE PLACINGS, RIGHTS ISSUES AND OPEN OFFERS?

A share placing is when new shares are issued to institutional investors, or small groups of investors for capital. This increases the amount of shares in issue and dilutes existing shareholders by spreading a company’s profit over a larger number of shares, which decreases earnings per share. Usually new or ‘primary’ shares are only offered to institutions, which differentiates a placing to a rights issue.

The latter involves the issue of rights to existing shareholders that entitles them to buy additional shares in proportion to their existing holdings, within a fixed period and at a specified price. If a holder takes up their entitlement in full, they will own the same percentage of the company as they held previously.

Rights issues can be an effective way for companies to raise new money for acquisitions or to strengthen balance sheets and this fundraising method is often employed at times of crisis. Lloyds Banking (LLOY) used a rights issue to raise £13.5 billion in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2009, for example, while the pandemic saw International Consolidated Airlines (IAG) and Rolls-Royce (RR.) announce multi-billion-pound rights issues to shore-up their balance sheets after the aviation sector was effectively grounded.

Rights issues aren’t always welcomed by shareholders, as their discounted price tends to pull down the market price of a stock. But many companies would argue that’s the price to pay to allow their business to grow – and that the longer-term benefits will more than compensate for the short-term pain.

An open offer gives existing shareholders the right to buy new shares in a company at a discount to the market price. You might also hear an open offer referred to as an entitlement issue. For example, if you owned 500 shares in a company, and an open offer is announced giving you the right to buy one share for every five you own, you could buy up to 100 new shares in total. Open offers and rights issues are similar, but one key difference is that with an open offer, you can’t sell your rights in the market.

PROS & CONS OF TAKING PART

The key benefit of taking part in placings and other fundraisings is that you are typically able to buy shares at a discount to the prevailing price, and you don’t pay stamp duty. Rarely is a placing done at a premium because then the investors could just buy the shares more cheaply in the market.

On PrimaryBid, retail investors have had an average discount of just under 10% across more than 170 deals since 2020, while in the year the platform completed its most deals – 2021 with 91 fundraisings – the average discount was still attractive at 9.1%.

James Deal, head of UK and co-founder of PrimaryBid, says shareholders deserve to have the opportunity to participate in public company fundraisings, especially when they are dilutive or at a price discount.

‘Rewarding investors for their long-standing support is obvious and part of pre-emption. So too is broadening the register with new investors of the same type, i.e. retail interests. With technology, we can facilitate such inclusion for issuers with ease.’

Aaqib Mirza, CTO of Peel Hunt who will become part of the RetailBook leadership, says that discounts through REX can vary, but the point to take away is ‘retail investors are being treated the same as institutions, so it is a level playing field’. Traditionally, institutions were the beneficiaries of these fundraising discounts, but now everyone is being treated the same.

‘We had a deal a week or two ago where the actual transaction was done at a premium to the close, so it is deal specific,’ he explains. Since launch in 2015 more than 50 deals have completed on the REX platform, generating demand of more than £450 million from retail investors.

Participating in a fundraising also means you are investing in the growth of the business unless it is a company in distress. On the flipside, if you don’t subscribe to the new shares being offered in a placing or open offer or take up your rights, your overall holding in the company will be diluted and you will suffer a decline in voting rights.

Also keep in mind that most of these placings happen after the stock market is closed for the day, so any retail investor without cash in their ISA or SIPP cannot sell an existing position in a different stock to raise money to fund their share placing application.

If you are not paying attention to messages from your investment platform provider, or studying the stock market announcements like a hawk, you might miss the placing opportunity. Investors typically have a short period – often just an hour – to apply for shares in the placing.

DILUTION & DIVIDENDS

Dilution through placings, rights issues and open offers affects the value of retail investors’ holdings depending on the number of additional shares issued in the fundraising and the number of shares held by retail investors. Increasing the number of shares in issue means both earnings and dividends per share are stretched more thinly.

Here’s an example using a hypothetical logistics firm, ‘Cheetah FastFreight’, which has a market capitalisation of £50 million with five million shares in issue. Let’s say it has allocated £1 million to pay out in dividends or 20p a share out of earnings of £2 million or 40p per share. If it issued one million new shares the dividend per share would reduce to 16.7p and the EPS would be 33.3p. In other words, if retail investors don’t participate in the placing, their share of earnings and dividends goes down materially.

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