Wishing everyone a happy, healthy and safe Christmas and a prosperous New Year!

Thursday 19th December 2024

As we approach the end of 2024, we at STJ Advisors wish you and your families a happy, healthy and safe
Christmas. Despite challenging market conditions, this has been a year of growth and significant achievements for us in a wide range of situations including strategic advisory, IPOs, exit advisory, demergers, private placements, strategic sale and block trades. We have provided strategic and capital markets advice to over 40 clients in 16 jurisdictions including UK, Italy, Spain, Germany, France and Japan.

We recently advised Kioxia on its US$800m IPO (valuation: US$5bn, shareholders: Bain Capital and Toshiba). Kioxia is the inventor and world’s leading supplier of NAND flash memory chips and NAND-related technologies to global technology companies. This transaction is the largest sponsor-backed IPO in Japan as well as the largest IPO globally in the semiconductor industry this year and reaffirms our position as the leading advisor on sponsor-backed IPOs in Japan.

Earlier in the year, we advised Premier Energy, one of Europe’s fastest growing energy infrastructure companies, on its €140m IPO in Romania, confirming our position as the leading ECM advisor on IPOs in Central and Eastern Europe. In addition, we were advisors to Marex, a global financial services platform providing liquidity and market access, in the preparatory stages of its IPO process, and later, our collaboration partner Solebury Capital advised on the successful c. US$300m IPO and c. US$300m Follow on in the US.

We are currently assisting airBaltic, Latvia’s national flag carrier, in preparing for its upcoming IPO. This year, we have successfully advised airBaltic on two high yield bond offerings raising c. €400m, including the largest ever Latvian corporate bond.

We have achieved significant success in working with venture capital investors and growth companies on a range of private placement opportunities. We recently advised iTech on the sale of a material minority stake in TradingView (valuation: US$4.5bn), a leading analytical platform and mobile app for traders and investors.

We continue to be the leader in formulating successful exit strategies and executing block trades for private equity sponsors. We advised on the block trades of InPost (€340m, Poland, shareholder: Advent International) and Helios Towers (€55m, UK, shareholders: Newlight Partners and RIT Capital).

We are seeing great results in our engagements with listed corporates across a range of sectors and geographies to optimise valuation and drive share price outperformance. A key theme this year has seen our clients asking us to become more deeply engaged in unpacking and profiling return on invested capital characteristics to open the path to valuation outcomes, related to the research we have undertaken on capital allocation dynamics.

Since advising Solvay on the demerger of Syensqo, we have been working with both companies on the
optimisation of their respective equity stories and engagement with existing and target shareholders. This year, we worked with a range of new and existing listed clients including Vonovia (Real Estate, Germany), Fluidra (Pool and Wellness, Spain), Raiffeisen (Financials, Austria) and Nexi (FinTech, Italy).

We are delighted to have expanded our team with seasoned capital markets and research professionals who bring a wealth of sector knowledge and client relationships. These include Anne Lange (Advisory Board Member and Senior Advisor for Belgium & France), Andrew Tusa (Chair, UK Advisory), Natalie Seebacher (Chair, DACH Advisory), Phil Middleton (MD, Strategic Research Advisory) and Clive Anderson (MD, Strategic Research Advisory).

We thank our clients for putting their trust in us. Our independence, breadth of experience and expertise enable us to deliver results unachievable for issuers or banks alone.

Looking ahead into the new year, we would welcome the opportunity to meet and discuss your strategic and capital markets objectives.

We wish you a Happy New Year.

STJ Advisors