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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: orkrious who wrote (82338)	6/2/2007 10:10:07 AM
From: Les H	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

Is Prince Alwaleed's IPO another signal of a global market top? When big investors sell off their assets, smaller investors ought to be wary. The news that Saudi Arabia's investment legend Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is planning a huge initial public offering before the end of next month should therefore set alarm bells ringing. In an interview with AME Info sister publication Middle East Economic Digest he revealed plans to float his Kingdom Holdings on the Saudi bourse in what would be its largest ever IPO. The new market regulations mean that the price of the sale will be set by a book building process, as in most global stock markets. But in the MEED interview Prince Alwaleed confirmed that the IPO is to be closed to non-Saudis. It is not yet clear what size of shareholding will be offered in the IPO. Samba Financial Group, partly owned by Kingdom Holdings, will be financial adviser for the huge IPO which could raise $7 billion on some estimates, dwarfing any previous local issue. Selling stakes Kingdom Holdings joins a growing list of private equity groups now looking to sell shares at a time of booming global stock markets. Last week, for example, China announced it is paying $3 billion for a 10 per cent stake in the US private equity firm Blackstone Group. Prince Alwaleed told MEED: 'We always wanted to go public. I always wanted to assist my country, so that is why I decided to put everything here.' However, Prince Alwaleed is not known as the Arabian Warren Buffett for nothing, and doubtless has excellent investment reasons for such a bold move which go beyond philanthropic nationalism. He must hope that the Kingdom Holdings IPO will restore confidence in the Saudi Arabian bourse which has lost more than half its value in a vicious stock market crash over the past year. That would, of course, necessarily entail an upward revision of the value of Kingdom Holdings at a time when its publicly quoted investments in global markets may come under pressure. ameinfo.com