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Wonderla gets listed with 32% premium

By TEAM VCC

  • 09 May 2014
Wonderla gets listed with 32% premium

Wonderla Holidays Ltd, which runs two amusement parks and a resort in the country, got listed on the stock exchanges with almost 32 per cent premium to its issue price on Friday. The firm, which had roped in TVS Capital and Aditya Birla Private Equity as anchor investors, saw its shares open at Rs 164.75 a unit on the BSE in a strong Mumbai market on Friday.

It ended the first day at Rs 157.6 a share, a premium of 26 per cent to the issue price, giving it a market cap of Rs 890 crore. This makes it the country’s seventh-largest travel and hospitality firm behind Indian Hotels (Taj Hotel Group), EIH (Oberoi), Thomas Cook, Cox & Kings, Mahindra Holidays & Resorts and ITDC.

The firm had earlier fixed an issue price of Rs 125 a share, at the upper end of the price band of Rs 115-125 a share.

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The company’s IPO was subscribed 38 times or oversubscribed 37x. The last big IPO to see large oversubscription was that of rating agency CARE, which recorded 40x oversubscription in late 2012.

The strong listing marks a positive development for the primary market which has been virtually shut for more than a year since Just Dial went public last May. Many firms withdrew their proposed IPOs despite the secondary market seeing sparkle and rising to hit new highs as the country approached the general elections.

Wonderla was the first significant IPO to sail through in India in a year and the biggest IPO in the hospitality sector since Mahindra Holiday & Resorts floated its IPO five years ago.

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Earlier, TVS Capital and Aditya Birla Private Equity picked a little over 1 per cent each in Wonderla for Rs 18.12 crore ($3 million). The two PE firms joined HDFC Infrastructure Fund, a part of the country’s top mutual fund house, to come in as anchor investors in the IPO of Wonderla.

Aditya Birla PE picked 1.1 per cent for Rs 8.4 crore while TVS Capital picked 1.37 per cent in Wonderla for Rs 9.72 crore.

Edelweiss and ICICI Securities were the book running lead managers to the IPO.

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Wonderla is raising capital to build a new amusement park in Hyderabad, which requires an investment of Rs 250.7 crore. The company has acquired 49.57 acres of land for this amusement park.

Wonderla has already invested Rs 22.6 crore for this and has raised around Rs 173 crore through the IPO, with the rest being raised through debt.

Over the past few years, the company saw positive growth in its revenue and profit margins. It clocked revenues of Rs 69.7 crore in FY10, which rose to Rs 91.2 crore in FY11, Rs 114.5 crore in FY12 and Rs 139.17 crore in FY13 and for the first nine months of the last fiscal ended December 31, 2013, clocked Rs 121.5 crore.

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Promoted by Kochouseph Chittilappilly and his son Arun Chittilappilly, Wonderla started its first amusement park in Kochi in 2000 and the second unit in Bangalore in 2005, following which it started its first resort.

This is the second firm of the promoters to go public. They had previously taken V-Guard Industries Ltd to the market. V-Guard, which counts Nalanda Capital as a large institutional shareholder, manufactures voltage stabilisers, pumps & motors, electric water heaters, solar water heaters, cables, UPSs and ceiling fans.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)

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