STJ Newsletter 2025

As we approach the end of another successful year, we would like to thank our clients for their continued trust and collaboration during 2025. We are proud to have supported their successes across a broad range of advisory areas including IPOs, Exit Advisory, Secondary Selldowns, Strategic Advisory and Private Placements in more than 15 jurisdictions including UK, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy and Japan. As always, our focus has been to provide the highest quality independent capital markets advice and execution, and to assist clients to achieve their objectives and to create positive outcomes for all stakeholders.

We advised on the $925m IPO of NOBA Bank on Nasdaq Stockholm, at the time the largest Swedish IPO since 2021. We worked closely with the shareholders and company to shape a compelling valuation narrative and facilitated one of the most extensive PDIE (pre-deal investor education) processes ever conducted. This contributed to an excellent valuation outcome at IPO and the strongest aftermarket performance of any major IPO in 2025.

Our Japan business continues to lead the market for sponsor-backed IPOs. This year, we completed three sponsor IPOs – Izawa Towels (shareholder: JAFCO) and Overlap Holdings (shareholder: Nippon Investment Company) and Nihon Safety (shareholder: Bain Capital).

Reflecting our leadership in equity capital markets advisory, STJ led the panel discussion on IPO Preparation at the London Stock Exchange IPO Forum, sharing insights on Driving IPO Success: Optimising the Reason to Buy for the Right Investors.

We continue to deliver excellent results in public Secondary Selldowns. A stand-out example was our advice to a consortium of investors led by TDR Capital on the €2.2bn monetisation of Ayvens shares via four sell-downs in just over five months – the result materially outperformed comparable PE public monetisations with faster execution, tighter pricing, and higher relative proceeds driving exceptional share-price and liquidity performance — a truly benchmark public market exit process.

Building on our proven track record in advising governments on their privatisation objectives, we advised FROB, the Spanish Government’s Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring, on its €185m monetisation of stake in Caixabank and the Government of Latvia on the sale of a strategic stake in its national carrier AirBaltic to Lufthansa.

Our Strategic Advisory team continues to deliver exceptional results in exit preparation. This year, we supported clients such as Veolia Water Technologies and Solutions (acquired by Veolia Group) to understand the valuation implications of multiple exit paths, and to enable the subsequent execution of the desired exit path for best result.

It has also been a year where our Strategic Advisory team has working closely with the management teams of many diverse publicly listed companies to improve their positioning and long-term growth ambitions, valuation, share registers and access to capital - across a range of geographies and industries, including in Financial Services, Defence, Consumer, Retail and Industrials.