The shares of German shoe manufacturer Birkenstock will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange today. The initial public offering (IPO) in the United States valued the company at $9.3 billion, double its value less than three years ago, according to the BBC. It will trade under the symbol “BIRK”.
Smooth start
The IPO earned the company $1.48 billion. The 32.3 million shares on offer sold for $46 a share, which Reuters said was a smooth start for the 250-year-old brand.
“It is clear that investors are cautious about the future development of the brand as the $46 per share price was set at the midpoint, not the upper end of the original range,” but analyst Susannah Streeter of Hargreaves Lansdown said.
The Fourth
Birkenstock is the fourth major company to list in the US in the last four weeks, following chipmaker Arm Holdings, food delivery app Instacart and marketing automation platform Klaviyo. Although all of these companies had a successful first day of trading on the stock market, their shares have since lost their gains. According to Renaissance Capital, there were only 71 IPOs in the US last year, the lowest number since 2009.
Birkenstock was founded in 1774 in the German village of Langen-Bergheim. It was run by the Birkenstock family for six generations until it sold a majority stake in 2021 to L Catterton, a group of private investors backed by French billionaire Bernard Arnault and his luxury empire LVMH.
Source: ČTK
