Bold move: GCash ditches dual listing plan; IPO to be a purely PSE affair in 2025

GCash, the country's largest fintech firm, will raise money through an initial public offering completely from the local equities market, ditching plans it had earlier floated for a dual listing on the Philippine Stock Exchange and a larger, more liquid foreign bourse.

A ranking company official told InsiderPH on Thursday, Nov. 28, 2024, that the IPO is tentatively scheduled for the second half of 2025, confirming a Bloomberg News report.

“[The second half of 2025] is really a very soft date,” the official said, requesting anonymity because discussions for the much awaited IPO are still ongoing. “There were good signs but the [stock] market has pulled back again.”

The plan to list GCash shares on two bourses -- the PSE and possibly a US stock exchange like the Nasdaq -- was conceived in response to worries that the Philippine capital market would not be deep enough in terms of its investors' funding ability for such a large issue, as well as concerns that the local bourse would not be liquid enough to allow the firm's stockholders to buy and sell shares at will.

GCash's parent firm, Mynt, now believes that the local market can, in fact, accommodate what will be the largest IPO in Philippine history.

“This is why market timing is important,” the official said.

Bloomberg reported that GCash – the popular mobile wallet used by an estimated 94 million Filipinos or 85 percent of the population – is planning to sell anywhere between $1 billion and $1.5 billion worth of shares to the public in the second half of next year.

At current exchange rates, the prospective GCash IPO would be worth P59 billion to P88 billion for anywhere between 20-25 percent of the firm's outstanding shares.

Even at the lower end of this range, an IPO of this amount would make it the largest in country to date, exceeding the current record holder, Monde Nissin Corp., which raised P55.89 through the PSE in 2021. Prior to this, Converge Information and Communications Technology Solutions Inc. raised P29.08 billion through the local bourse in October 2020.

In April 2013, LT Group Inc., the holding company of tycoon Lucio Tan, raised about P37.72 billion through a follow-on offering on the Philippine Stock Exchange.

Earlier this year, GCash's parent firm, Mynt, sold shares to Japanese investors MUFG and Mitsubishi Corp. which kicked up the value of GCash from the previous $2 billion to $5 billion.