Access Engineering shares to debut on Tuesday

The maiden trading of shares of Access Engineering Ltd. (AEL) will take place on Tuesday 27 March.

Under the Security Code AEL-N-0000, one billion ordinary voting shares will be listed on the Diri Savi Board of the CSE. AEL will be classified under the Construction and Engineering sector.

The AEL IPO for Rs. 500 million (20 million shares at Rs. 25 each), first for 2012, was oversubscribed by 1.5 times raising Rs. 773 million worth of applications.

There were 942 investors who have applied for 30,644,400 shares at the IPO and 802 investors under the retail investor category were allotted 909,200 shares whilst the balance 19,090,800 shares were allotted to the investors who had applied under the non-retail investor category.

According to the basis of allotment, all the retail investors and the investors who applied up to Rs. 10 million (400,000 shares) under the non-retail investor category were allotted 100% of the shares applied. The offered stake via the IPO was 2%.

AEL raised Rs. 4.5 billion in June 2011 through an issue of shares where the minimum investment was Rs. 10 million and with the allotment at the IPO, the company has been able to cater to small investors as well as high net worth investors in a fair manner.

Investors who applied for shares above 400,000 and up to and inclusive of 1,000,000 were allotted 90.53% of the shares applied whilst all other investors who applied for more than 1,000,000 shares were allotted 1,000,000 shares each.

“The maximum limit on allotment for large investors was with a view to broad base our shareholding through full allotment being given to small and medium scale investors, since large investors at the private placement got the full allotment in accordance with the shares they applied for,” AEL Chairman Sumal Perera said.

The funds raised will be used to partly finance the working capital requirements of a housing project to the value of Rs. 3 billion undertaken by the company on behalf of UDA.

Established in 2001, AEL has established itself as a leading construction company offering innovative value engineering solutions comprising design, procurement, construction and commissioning of numerous multidisciplinary engineering projects for both the Government and the private sector of Sri Lanka.

Over this short span of existence, AEL has carved out a name and stature for itself in the construction and engineering sector of the country which has resulted in the company seeing continuous unprecedented growth while leveraging proficiency and competencies it possesses to generate value for its stakeholders. It has also in its short period of existence won many construction industry and national business excellence awards.