| Deals of the year: Tech and telecoms illustrate the ups and downs of 2000 Author: Jennifer Morris Issuer: SiemensDeal: IPO, equity carve-out of InfineonAmount: e6 billionDate: March 13 2000Global co-ordinators: Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank Luck isn’t a word that bankers use very often. But few deny that there was an element of it in Siemens’ IPO of Infineon, its semiconductor division, back in March. According to Christian Meissner, executive director of equity capital markets at Goldman Sachs, the timing of the deal could not have been better. Infineon caught the crest of the wave of tech-stock enthusiasm with semiconductor companies in particular enjoying record performance in the fourth quarter of 1999 and investors queuing to get their hands on the shares. As a result, the issue closed 32 times oversubscribed and priced at e35 – the very top of the pricing range – making it Europe’s biggest-ever hi-tech IPO. “We could have priced it substantially higher than we did and still got double the demand,” says Meissner. All this is a far cry from where Infineon was in 1998. A small semiconductor manufacturer generating uncertain profits, it was a millstone around Siemens’ neck and little else. |