KARACHI: Book-building for Supernet Ltd, an information technology company wholly owned by TeleCard Ltd, will take place on April 12-13, a regulatory filing said on Monday.

With participation from institutional investors and high net worth individuals, the book-building process determines the share price at which a company goes public. Retail investors then get the chance to buy shares at the same price in the second phase of the listing process.

Companies belonging to the IT sector have seen major activity on the stock exchange in recent years. A research report by Arif Habib Ltd showed profits of listed technology firms rose 47 per cent in 2021 on a year-on-year basis. The ICT corporate market in Pakistan is estimated to be worth anywhere between $500 million and $750m a year.

Supernet Ltd offers its customers a portfolio of local-to-global integrated communications infrastructure solutions, including fibre, radio and satellite–based services. Its clients range from enterprise customers to other telecom operators, defence organisations and government sector entities.

The purpose of the IPO is to generate funds for working capital and capital expenditure for the provision of network infrastructure at customer premises like routers, switches, optical fibre, LAN and Wifi infrastructure. Additionally, raising equity will help the company scale up its computing capabilities, including servers, storage, cloud services and enterprise applications besides power infrastructure and cyber security.

The company’s profit jumped 6.8 times on an annual basis to Rs233.4m in the last fiscal year.

Published in Dawn, March 29th, 2022