Daily Times

Karachi: The book-building process of Citi Pharma’s Initial Public Offer (IPO) has concluded with an oversubscription of 2 times, according to Topline Securities, advisor and book runner of the issue.

“The IPO received an overwhelming response from institutional investors and high-net worth individuals as the strike price clocked in at Rs 32/share, 14.3% higher than the floor price of Rs 28,” the leading API Manufacturer of the country said in a statement.

Citi Pharma has raised Rs 2.32 billion in total, making it the second Pharma sector IPO in 23 years and the single largest IPO of 2021 till date.

“The response to the book building was far better than our expectations” said Mohammed Sohail of Topline Securities. In the last IPO (Organic Meat) managed by Topline investors have made a gain of close to 90% in a year.
Several brokerages had issued almost unanimous calls to ‘subscribe,’ which resulted in investor demand amounting to Rs 4 billion against the IPO’s book-building size of Rs 2 billion. Investors who bid at PKR 32 will get approx. 10% of their bid quantity.

The general public will subscribe to the remaining 18.1 million shares (25 percent of the total offer size) on June 23/24 at the strike price of Rs 32” the company said.

Rizwan Ahmed, CEO Citi Pharma, in his message thanked investors for their overwhelming response and vowed to ensure growth of their shareholders’ equity.

Citi Pharma plans to become the first fully integrated listed pharmaceutical company in Pakistan, serving from raw material consumers to end medicine consumers.

Citi Pharma has achieved a revenue growth from PKR 1,016 million in FY16 to PKR 3,528 million in FY20. The company recorded PKR 4,015 million in sales during 9MFY21 already surpassing last year’s sales.

Company is planning to expand its existing capacity of 3,600 tonnes per annum of paracetamol to 6,000 tonnes per annum. In addition, the company says it plans to add new APIs as well as a pharmaceutical formulation, or final products, to its existing product line.

Citi Pharma also wants to build three manufacturing facilities, taking its total capacity to 200,000 injectables per day, dry powder to 60,000 bottles per day, capsules to 4.2 million per day, and tablets to 4.5 million per day. These include dedicated manufacturing lines for penicillin, cephalosporin, and psychotropic and narcotics drugs.