While the momentum for IPOs may not be building quite so fast as this time last year, some offers are beginning to come through. Shares in HSS Hire opened for subscription earlier this week, while infrastructure manager and investor John Laing Group has also announced its intention to float. The former is hoping to raise £103m from its premium listing on the London Stock Exchange. Applications for shares are open to institutional investors, as well as retail through an intermediary. The offer price is expected to be between 210p and 262p.
The group hopes the floatation will help reduce its current leverage and provide more capacity for it to grow the business further. It will continue to focus on growing its number of UK branches. Chris Davies, chief executive at HSS said the group will accelerate from its target of opening one branch a week, in order to grow the branch network from 265 to 500 in UK and Ireland over the next few years.
The tool and equipment hire company intends to follow a "progressive" dividend policy, with a medium term target of three to four and a half times normalised earnings cover.
John Laing's IPO is expected to raise around £130m to fund new infrastructure investments. The business focuses on major transport, social and environmental infrastructure projects awarded under governments’ public-private partnership (PPP) deals. The group maintains the projects through their lifetime, which provides a steady stream of cashflow once the assets are built.
The group's pipeline of PPP work had grown to around £1.1bn at 30 September from £600m at 31 December 2010. The majority of this work is from outside the UK. Olivier Brousse, CEO at John Laing, said the group intends to extend more into the US, which required greater capital. Brousse said the company had previously "turned down some good projects because [it] didn't have enough money".
John Laing’s renewable energy pipeline of work represented around £275m at 30 September 2014. Brousse said these relatively short-term projects complements its more lengthy PPP work by ensuring steady investment.
