Firmus considering postponing float: report

Australian data centre company Firmus is set to postpone its initial public offering, and the company is weighing a private funding round instead, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company is in talks with existing investors and others for the private round, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information isn’t public. Order-taking for the IPO closed as scheduled on Thursday morning, yet there was no clear indication of the price or deal structure, Bloomberg News reported earlier.

Deliberations are ongoing and details could still change, the people said. A spokesperson for Firmus didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Firmus had priced its IPO at $11 a share, which would give it a market valuation of about $43.7 billion.

Some potential investors turned more cautious as the deal progressed, voicing concern over existing shareholders potentially flooding the market soon after the company’s debut, people familiar with the matter have said. The overhang added to questions over what some investors see as an aggressive pricing strategy, they said.

“I’ve never seen an IPO so polarising,” Jun Bei Liu, co-founder and lead portfolio manager at Ten Cap Investment, said on Bloomberg TV. “There was a lot of international investor interest, however, when it comes to the crunch, the demand seems like it isn’t there when they were asked to put up the capital that’s required.”

Firmus was co-founded by Oliver Curtis, the husband of public relations consultant and influencer Roxy Jacenko. He served one year in jail in 2016-17 for insider trading before co-founding Firmus as a bitcoin mining company in 2019.

Proceeds from the listing would have funded purchases of graphics processing units for its first data centre project in Batam, Indonesia, being developed with DayOne Data Centres Ltd., as part of an eight-year partnership with Nvidia. Singapore-headquartered DayOne has filed for a US IPO and is seeking to raise as much as $US5 billion, people familiar with the matter have said.

Firmus has inked a number of large deals, securing $US2 billion in commitments from investors including Nvidia and Blackstone. High-profile Australians, including billionaire James Packer, former treasurer Joe Hockey and investor Alex Waislitz, have stakes in the company, alongside fund managers Ellerston Capital and Regal Partners.

Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley and Morgans Financial are acting as joint lead managers on the listing.

More to come

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