Brazil’s bankers are optimistic that several IPOs will soon come to market after a barren 12 months. This follows the record debut listing of Visanet on the Bovespa at the end of last month. At R$8.24 billion ($4.24 billion) the deal, managed by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Banco Santander and BB Investimentos, the investment-banking arm of Bradesco, is the biggest Brazilian IPO so far this year. A number of follow-on offerings are seeing the light of day too.
"I’m pretty busy right now. The market is returning quite fast to relative normalcy," says Evandro Pereira, head of equity markets at UBS Pactual, which will stay under the UBS banner until the central bank approves BTG’s acquisition of Pactual later this month.
"Two months ago we wouldn’t have thought that the Visanet IPO was doable or that six follow-ons could be priced within just a few weeks but now we find that it is pretty much business as usual," says an optimistic Pereira.
But he notes that only certain names could successfully do an IPO. "Small IPOs would be hard to price but given the way that the market is performing I wouldn’t rule out other IPOs by the end of the year.