[2007-10-15]  Morocco's Ynna launches first of six IPOs - chief
Morocco's Ynna, a large family-owned conglomerate, will this month launch the first of six initial public offerings (IPOs) of affiliates to raise money to finance expansion and expose it more to market forces, its chairman said.

"We are starting with Electrolysis and Petrochemical National Company (SNEP). (Real estate company) Chaabi Lil Iskane will be listed early next year and the other four companies will follow," Miloud Chaabi told Reuters an interview late on Wednesday.

Chaabi Lil Iskane is Morocco's largest real estate and construction firm. Chaabi did not name other firms and gave no precise timetable, saying that would depend on Ynna's advising banks.

Analysts said the Ynna move -- the largest combined offerings by a family-owned business in the last decade -- would energise Casablanca's stock market by helping it become more liquid and diversified.

They said that Ynna's bold plan would put pressures on other similar companies, most of them cocooned from market pressures, to go public or make more of their subsidiaries public.

Family-owned firms dominate the private sector which accounts for two-thirds of Morocco's $52 billion economy, according to estimates by independent economists.

Many of these firms do not pay taxes and do not benefit from the government's schemes to prepare the economy for foreign competition, economists say.

Analysts argue the shift of family-owned firms to public companies would modernise Morocco's capitalism at a time when the North African kingdom's domestic market is wrestling with fierce competition from abroad.

SIX IPOs

"Ynna's plan to list six companies is good for the market in general, for the bourse and for the firms themselves as they would gain in exposure to the market and raise money to invest in expansion," said Anas Berrada, managing director of the corporate finance department of Moroccan Attijariwafa Bank, North Africa's largest bank by assets.

Chaabi said: "The IPOs will benefit Morocco's economy and Ynna ... We have good management and our group is widely known for its transparency and good governance at home and abroad but we want our group to shift from a family-owned to a public business."

Ynna has affiliates in agribusiness, construction, tourism, department stores, environmental, real estate, manufacturing and chemical activities.

It has subsidiaries in Egypt, Jordan, United Arab Emirates and Tunisia.

Ynna is offering a 35 percent stake in SNEP on October 22-26, with the shares priced at between 1,150 dirhams and 1,250 dirhams each to raise up to 1.050 billion dirhams.

That would value SNEP at around 3.0 billion dirhams.

The final share price would be fixed on November 2 and the stock would make its debut on the bourse on November 7.

SNEP has about a 70 percent share of the domestic market and posted 77.958 million dirhams in net profit last year, up from 43.4 million in the previous year and 16.239 million in 2004.

It expects 121 million net profit this year and 198 million in the following year before increasing its profit to 224 million in 2011, the company said

Source: © Reuters 2007