Brills, a provider of modular robot platform solutions, surged more than 135% above its offering price on its first day of trading on the KOSDAQ market.
As of 9:27 a.m. on the 1st, Brills traded at 46,000 won, up 26,500 won, or 135.90%, from its offering price of 19,500 won, according to the Korea Exchange.
The company drew strong interest from the subscription stage. In the retail subscription held on Sept. 17 and 18, demand reached 1,676.26 times the shares on offer, with deposits totaling about 4.9031 trillion won across 113,800 applications.
In the earlier book-building for institutional investors, 2,181 institutions at home and abroad took part, with demand at 1,187.74 times the shares offered. With 98.93% of participating institutions bidding at or above the top of the indicative range, the offering price was set at 19,500 won, the upper end of the 16,500-to-19,500-won range. The company raised a total of 23.4 billion won by issuing 1.2 million new shares, giving it a market capitalization of about 221.6 billion won based on the offering price. Institutions agreed to lock up 21.75% of their allocations, lowering the share of freely tradable stock on the first day to 21% from 26%.
Brills provides robot systems for manufacturing sites, covering design, software development, production, installation and after-sales service. Using industrial robots, collaborative robots and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), it supplies precision inspection, assembly, logistics and safety control solutions for automotive, secondary battery and semiconductor production lines. The company said it has modularized robot control, vision, inspection and safety technologies accumulated from more than 1,300 projects and applies them to each client's processes.
Brills returned to profit last year and stayed in the black in the first half of this year. On a consolidated basis, first-half revenue was 13.65709 billion won and operating profit was 841.2 million won. Exports over the same period came to about 7.75 billion won, up 130.9% from a year earlier, accounting for 56.7% of total revenue. The company plans to strengthen support for North American customers and technical services through its local unit in Michigan, which it established in April.
