Some 13,400 orders were placed by individual investors in the first week of the initial public offering (IPO) of the Romanian electricity distributor Electrica, and the total value of the subscriptions was more than EUR 140 million, according to official data.

The Electrica IPO started on Monday, June 16, and ends this Wednesday, June 25. The company, which is currently 100 percent state owned, sells 171.19 million of its own shares, representing 51 percent of its capital, and wants to raise at least EUR 443 million.

Some 15 percent of the IPO is reserved for individual investors, who have two tranches, one for small subscriptions, between 250 and 20,000 shares and one for large subscriptions of more than 20,000 shares.

The tranche for small investors gathered the largest subscriptions so far, with almost 41 million shares subscribed. The number of shares allotted for this tranche is 12.4 million so the tranche is already 3.3 times oversubscribed.

Investors rushed in to get the early subscription benefits on this tranche, as orders placed in the first five days of the IPO, which was up to Friday, June 20, inclusively, got a 5 percent discount to the final IPO price.

Some 4,260 orders were placed for the discount segment of the tranche, totaling 33.2 million shares. Another 9,000 orders were place on the guaranteed segment, where investors get the exact number of shares that they ask for (one for one allotment). This facility is for orders of up to 1,000 shares and is limited at a total of 10 million shares. Up until now, 7.77 million shares were subscribed on this segment.

On the individual tranche for large investors, where subscriptions are more than 20,000 shares, 100 orders have been recorded so far, for a total of 5.2 million shares. The tranche has a total of 14.175 million shares.

For the institutional investor tranche, which is 85 percent of the total offer, subscriptions are not public. However, energy minister Razvan Nicolescu said last week that the tranche should be subscribed by Monday, which is today.

Andrei Chirileasa, andrei@romania-insider.com