The current shareholders of Kaspi.kz are going to sell around nine million depository receipts during an initial public offering on Nasdaq, according to a report filed to the U.S. Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC), Bloomberg reported.
By now, depository receipts issued by the fintech group are traded on the London Stock Exchanges (LSE) at $97. This means that the total amount of the offering is going to be about $873 million, while the holding will be valued at $18 billion. The company isn’t going to issue new shares or raise capital. The offering will be secured by major stakeholders of Kaspi.kz: Vyacheslav Kim, Mikhail Lomtadze and Asia Equity Partners (part of Baring Vostok). Their shares will be converted into depository receipts.
Kaspi.kz revealed its intention to offer depository receipts in the U.S. in October 2023 during its discloser obligations on the LSE. However, there were no details about the size, price range and platform for this offering. In late December 2023, the company filed an application to the SEC requesting a listing in the U.S. with the help of its underwriters Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Citigroup. Kaspi.kz also revealed that it would offer securities worth $100 million, which is nine times less than the current evaluation of the company. At the time, Kaspi.kz didn’t confirm whether it was going to issue new shares or sell the existing ones.
Securities issued by Kaspi.kz have been traded on the LSE since 2020. Back then the company issued additional shares by offering 15% of its capital. At the time, the company’s owners gained $1 billion on that IPO. The company’s shares are also traded on the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange (KASE).
As of January 1, 2023, Baring Vostok, Lomtadze and Kim were the biggest shareholders of Kaspi.kz as they controlled 26.13%, 23.42% and 22.27% of the company’s shares, respectively. The holding has been buying its depository receipts back since 2022. So far, Kaspi.kz completed four stages of this process when it bought securities for $100 million at each stage. (In fact, the company failed to buy the announced number of receipts at every stage.) In the fall of last year, Kaspi.kz announced the start of the fifth stage of the buyback process.
Over the first nine months of 2023, Kaspi.kz earned $1.3 billion, which is a 50% increase over the previous year. Payment transactions, marketplace and fintech services were the key drivers of that growth.
