Prestige Biopharma raises 453 billion won from Korean IPO

SINGAPORE-BASED biotech firm Prestige Biopharma has raised net proceeds of 453 billion won (S$539.9 million) from an initial public offering (IPO) on the Korea Exchange.

Its shares ended their second day of trading at 42,600 won on Monday, up 33.1 per cent from the IPO price of 32,000 won.

This gave it a market capitalisation of 2.6 trillion won. The company told The Business Times last month that it was expecting an implied market capitalisation of between 1.8 trillion won and 1.93 trillion won.

The public offer tranche of 20 per cent of the offering was about 237 times oversubscribed. Applications for a total of 727.6 million depositary receipts were received with a subscription margin that amounted to about 11.64 trillion won.

The placement tranche of 12.3 million depositary receipts was about 800 times oversubscribed. This was largely supported by the strong appetites of over 1,100 international and local institutional investors, Prestige Biopharma said.

Founded in 2015 by chief executive Lisa Park and co-founder Michael Kim, Prestige Biopharma specialises in the development of new antibody therapeutics and biosimilars, which are copies of biologic drugs - or drugs derived from living organisms - with expired or expiring patents.

The company was previously valued privately at US$826.9 million after raising US$71.5 million in a Series B round, VentureCap Insights data showed.

Prestige BioPharma intends to utilise its net IPO proceeds for research and development and facility investment, and for entering the global market.

"Our listing is an important inflexion point for Prestige BioPharma as we now have ample resources to pursue our expansion plans in the global biopharmaceutical market," said Ms Park.

"With our biosimilar and antibody drugs in the pipeline, we are very excited about our growth prospects. We will do our best toward our goal of becoming one of the world's top 10 biopharma companies specialising in the field of antibody drugs by 2030."