Dubai: Al Ansari Financial Services has set a price range of Dh1-Dh1.03 for its IPO opening for subscription today (March 16), and aiming to be the first of more UAE family-owned businesses that will go on to a listing on DFM or ADX.

The IPO offers 750 million shares from a group whose flagship entity Al Ansari Exchange is the UAE market leader in the remittance space. The details of the price range was announced through a newspaper ad.

The Al Ansari subscription runs until March 24, for a float that sees 10 per cent of the Dubai-headquartered company being offered to retail and institutional investors. The funds raised will be used to expand the group’s already entrenched presence in the UAE and also seek strategic forays into some of the other Gulf markets.

The funds will also come in handy to expand on the digital side of the business services, with remittance flows already seeing heavy transactions through online and app options in the Gulf.

A third push post-IPO for Al Ansari would be to raise its ‘value proposition’ in the higher margin corporate remittance space.

“The remittance business is integral to the UAE/Gulf markets – and as a market leader there’s much that Al Ansari can do to seek higher growth in the next few years,” said a market analyst. “How fast it can get into the other Gulf markets will be decisive.”

Kuwait presence

The operations in Kuwait, where it launched in 2002, will soon be completely owned by Al Ansari Financial Services. On completion of the deal, this gives the group a ‘strong presence in the sixth-largest outward personal remittances market globally in 2021’.

UAE’s busy with IPOs

The UAE currently has a second IPO subscription process running, that for presight.ai, part of the Abu Dhabi based G42 conglomerate. (Media reports this have said that G42 has taken a stake in ByteDance, the Chinese company behind the wildly successful TikTok short-video digital portal.)

And there was the listing by ADNOC Gas on ADX after a blockbuster IPO.

More to follow...