Inderes Oyj starts trading on the Nasdaq Helsinki Finnish Stock Exchange on Monday October 11th, 2021. I am buying it, but only holding it until the lift-off breaks under this hot IPO. Where will the real growth come from? Inderes will not be able to compete in Sweden and it already has an almost monopoly in Finnish listed stocks.
Inderes Oyj was founded in 2009 to provide analyst services to small and middle cap Finnish listed companies after banks and other financial institutions stopped covering them in the 2008 financial crisis. The business model from the beginning was to ask the companies themselves pay for research work. Most large cap listed Finnish companies do not pay for analyst coverage. Inderes currently has 155 listed companies in Finland as clients, which equates to the majority of the Helsinki market.
Covid-19 was a lottery win for Inderes
The whole Inderes offering changed in 2019 when it bought Swedish Flik video productions with offices in Stockholm and Helsinki. This enabled the company to really take Covid-19 as a golden opportunity to push its online services for listed companies on IR needs and other communications.
Starting from quarterly reports online, annual shareholder meetings online and Capital Markets Days (CMDs), Inderes was able to really earn its money and increase turnover for 2020 and 2021. This is due to the employees and their efforts, and they get rewarded with this IPO. Inderes (Flik) now has four studios in Helsinki and one in Stockholm, Sweden.
IPO huge success at 25 euros
The IPO offering was oversubscribed 8.3 times – the employees 1,2 times and the public (or Inderes subscribers numbered at 64,000) 8,3 times = together that’s 6,3 times. The public did not get enough stock – so they will buy up the stock and drive the price higher – how high we will see on Monday.
This will be a listing, which will go up on Monday 11th, October when Inderes starts trading at €25 with a market cap of €40 million and with 1,633,362 shares outstanding for trade – there are lockups for Inderes personnel who cannot sell in the next three years.
There is still a very small chance that individuals “panic” and sell their shares when the company becomes public – will it hold the €25 level easily and the employees’ 10% discount level of €22.50 level. The interesting question is how hard will Inderes’ cult followers chase the stock on Monday morning, because most of them did not even get the minimum 20 shares allotment. They were cut to 10 shares.
With individual investors this is very interesting exercise – the FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out- in the first hours of trading could be significant. Maybe we will lift off and never test the IPO price in the near term or there will be a time to purchase the stock after a couple of weeks of trading? There were only 58 shareholders before the IPO –there will be more than 10,000 on Monday.
Cashing out at the top
There have been many Finnish publications raising the issue that the top management and previous stock holders at Inderes are just cashing out at the top. This seems to be the case since the only owner institution Taaleri is selling most of its shares before the transaction and Inderes will buy the rest from Taaleri after the successful IPO.
What has happened in Finland since 2020?
Finally, in 2020 the individual investor was introduced a the new instrument allowing them to buy and trade stocks inside individual retirement accounts (IRA) “Osakesäästötili” in Finnish. All Finns can have only one personal IRA account and currently it is capped to €50,000, but there is political pressure to raise the limit after its huge success. Over 200,000 Finns have opened one and more will follow. Of course as usual the Finnish socialists were against it, but the scheme somehow it made it through, long after Sweden, which has ten times the vibrant markets, but only double the population. There are 5,6 million Finnish people and over 1 million have trading accounts: regular accounts and now IRAs.
Reputation risk
Since Inderes is not a financial institution: a bank or an investment bank it is not regulated by the Finnish financial regulator. This is very strange, because Inderes is the only analyst house covering many names in the market. This gives the analyst a great deal of power to move the prices of the stocks they cover.
The Inderes CEO Mikael Rautanen has addressed the issue many times, claiming that all analysts can only buy €50,000 worth of a particular stock, and if it continues to go up they can still hold it but not add to it. For example analyst Petri Kajaani had bought €50,000 worth of Harvia, but during September 2021 his stake was over €400,000. It is good that analysts have “skin” in the game, but it should always be disclosed how much when they report about the companies.
The future and the end game for Inderes
Currently the employees and the top management have three year exit clauses to sell their stock, but I would not be surprised if the company is bought or merged before that happens. Inderes has a monopoly on the Finnish public listed small/medium capital market size companies, but for how long?
UK brokers who give you access to Nordic stocks include Saxo Markets and eToro, who give access to UK individuals to participate in Nordic stocks in the UK market.
