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The corporate bonds issued by Artprint Bucuresti (ATPR23), the first private printing house established after 1990 in Romania, will start trading on Tuesday on the Multilateral Trading System (SMT) of the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BVB), a release by the BVB informs.
According to the source, this is the fifth company to take the step in the Romanian capital market this year.
Thus, Artprint is the first printing house to list bonds on the BVB. The company carried out a private bond placement between 10 and 13 December 2019, attracting 3.89 million lei. The bonds have a maturity of 4 years and a fixed interest of 9% per year, payable semi-annually.
"Artprint is the fifth entrepreneurial company to take the plunge into the capital market this year. At the same time, we are pleased that this issue of bonds is only a first step of the company on the capital market, in preparation for the list of Artprint shares. The capital market is an ecosystem, in which everyone fulfills their role, and we can say that the success of Artprint's financing round depended largely on Goldring, one of the most active brokers in attracting financing for companies," said Radu Hanga, chairman of the BVB Board of Directors.
In the private placement, Artprint issued 38,902 bonds, with a nominal value of 100 lei, which were purchased by 50 investors, including 47 individual investors and 3 institutional investors.
"For Artprint, this is a first step, a very important one in fact, on the paradigm shift for financing through the mechanisms of the capital market, considering that banks and other financiers are omnipresent in the life of societies. It is a challenge in all aspects - operational, investment, managerial, which involves changes including in the organization's culture," said Cezar Rasuceanu, managing director and founding director of Artprint.
The private placement and the admission to trading of the bonds were assisted by Goldring as an authorized consultant.
Artprint will use the amount attracted to finance the investment programme, to restructure the financing of capital and to finance the working capital needs. Beyond the perspective of the financial strategy, the strategic objective of this placement is to test the investor appetite for the Artprint business, to have the value of the company validated by the market and increase it so as to prepare the admission to trading of the Artprint shares.
The company was founded in 1990, and since 2011, after the takeover by Cezar Alexandru Rasuceanu Fiul, Artprint changed its strategy by reviewing the product portfolio, as well as the market segment(s) it serves. Thus, it started to print books and other printing products with high circulation, while it abandoned the printing products with small or intensive editions in manual labor. Equally, large publishing houses in Romania were approached and small customers or those with high credit risk were gradually abandoned.
Currently, Artprint works with almost all book publishers in Romania and is one of the most important suppliers for them, with a circulation of approx. 4.5 million books annually. The transformation process involved investments in equipment as well as the acquisition of competitors (equipment and customer portfolio) such as Romprint, Cronoman and Cicero Frazi.
Artprint closed 2019 with revenues of RON 35 million, up 43% as compared to 2018 and an EBITDA profit of RON 2.1 million, by 38% higher than in 2018).
The company has a share capital of 1.01 million lei, divided into 101,010 shares, with a nominal value of 10 lei/share. The sole administrator of the company, Cezar-Alexandru Rasuceanu, holds 99% of the share capital, and Constanta Rasuceanu holds 1% of the shares.
