Transcorp Hotels announced its board has approved its IPO scheduled to commence September 24th and to end after just one week. This from my experience must be the shortest IPO that I have seen in Nigeria (at least going by recent IPO’s).
I am not particularly happy with this because of the short timeline one has to properly digest the Offer prospectus before making a call on whether to invest or not. This might not be much of an issue for big time institutional investor but for retail investors like me, I find this hard to accept. By commencing the IPO on the 24th of September, the buying public only has 7 days to read through the prospectus before the offer is opened and must decide within that period or lose out on purchasing it.
On a flip side by allowing for just 7 days, there probably is an air of confidence from the part of Transcorp Hotels Plc that the IPO will be fully subscribed. It could be that the offer is 100% underwritten which insulates them from the risk of an under subscription.
I guess if you don’t want to purchase at the IPO price, you can purchase the shares in the open market from November 5 2014 when the shares is expected to be listed.
