Agricultural Bank of Ghana extends IPO to attract investors

BLOOMBERG

Ghana’s Agricultural Development Bank Ltd. extended its initial public offering (IPO) by a month to attract more retail investors and may sell as much as 100 million cedis ($26 million) more of stock than it initially planned.
Demand for shares from individual investors surged during the final week of the original proposed sales period, Solomon Adu Atefoe, a spokesman for the Accra-based lender, said.
The Securities and Exchange Commission gave approval for the state-owned bank to sell an additional 100 million cedis of stock should the IPO be oversubscribed, he said.
“We received a massive retail rush in the last week of the previous deadline, that’s why we had to extend,” Atefoe said. About 98 percent of bank staff bought shares,
he said.
The bank originally intended the IPO to end on February 26 and to raise 400 million cedis by selling 74.9 million new securities and 75.5 million existing shares at 2.65 cedis each.
Agricultural Development Bank of Ghana, commonly known as Agricultural Development Bank or ADB, is a government-owned development and commercial bank in Ghana. The bank is the first development finance institution established by the Government of Ghana. It is one of the commercial banks licensed by the Bank of Ghana, the national banking regulator.
The bank is a large development and commercial bank. As of April 2010, ADB was the leading financial
institution in agricultural financing in Ghana, responsible for 35 percent of the total bank industry financing of agriculture.
In September 2010, the bank was recognised as Bank Of The Year at the Africa Investor Agribusiness Awards, in Durban, South Africa, the first institution so recognised, at this annual event. The total assets of the institution at the end of December 2011 were valued at approximately US$683.6 million.