Oversubscription Heralds Ax Listing For Tourism Co

Oversubscription Heralds Ax Listing For Tourism Company

Strong Investor Support For Leading Tour Operator Southern Travel Holdings

Southern Travel Holdings today announced that it had successfully completed its $5.85 million capital raising ahead of its listing as the first NZAX inbound tourism company.

The Southern Travel Holdings share offer closed oversubscribed on Tuesday 28 September with its shares expected to be allotted today ahead of the company's listing on the NZAX on Friday 1 October.

With no public pool, Southern Travel Holdings offered investors 4.5 million new and existing shares by firm allocation at $1.30 per share. The capital raised will be used to allow the company to expand its operations, including in Australia , make strategic acquisitions as well as repay some debt.

Ross Keenan, Chairman, Southern Travel Holdings, says the firm allocation arranged by the Lead Manager (Bancorp New Zealand ) and Organising Broker (McDouall Stuart) received positive uptakes from brokers and investors around New Zealand .

"I welcome the support from investors who appreciate the value in Southern's business as an established, successful inbound tour operator with strong growth prospects in New Zealand 's booming tourism industry. The Executive Director and Founder, Kiyomi Gunji and I were confident that the shares would be fully allocated given the strength of the company's performance to date and this has been confirmed more than we expected with the oversubscription," says Keenan.

Andrew McDouall, Managing Director of Organising Broker, McDouall Stuart says that the oversubscription of Southern's offer is a positive sign of the sustained interest and growing value found in investments in diverse industry sectors such as tourism.

"Broker requests for firm allocation exceeded the stock available by at least a third indicating continuing strong support for NZAX and smaller equity issues in the market," says Andrew McDouall.

McDouall also says that the oversubscription had one other significant benefit for the company.

"Southern will also end up with in excess of 500 new shareholders. This bodes very well as a well spread stock base means that the investment appealed across the board from habitual investors, institutions to mums and dads."

Southern is currently focused on the lucrative Japanese inbound market in which it has a leading position in New Zealand and a growing presence in Australia 's significant tourism industry.

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