Date : 07 Ekim  2013 Pazartesi - 14:54, Category : BUSINESS

Labour politicians have said the expected strong debut for the postal operator indicates that the government has undervalued the company.
IG Index, a spread-betting company, was on Monday offering a price of 392p-412p for the closing price on Friday, the first day of conditional trading of Royal Mail shares. Bankers handling the sale told institutional investors last Friday that the government’s range for the flotation was expected to be between 300p and 330p a share.

The upper figure would value the almost 500-year-old company at £3.3bn.
David Jones, chief market strategist at IG Index, said the Royal Mail pre-offering grey market was the strongest in the UK since LastMinute.com in 2000 and could well match the popularity of Facebook, which listed in New York in May 2012.
“We’ve seen a few people booking profit today but about 90 per cent of people are buyers for this,” he said. “We usually see a two-way flow but this market has been different.”
The strength of the demand is reflected by IG Index’s mid-price jumping 9 per cent since Thursday.
Mr Jones attributed the interest to Royal Mail being a well-known company, the offering being open to retail investors as well as institutions, and people’s memory of high-profile privatisations in the 1980s, such as BT and British Gas.
Order books are due to close on Tuesday. The final price and allocations will be announced on Friday, when the shares begin conditional trading. Full trading will start on October 15, when retail investors will be able to sell.
Retail investors are expected to be offered about 30 per cent of the shares being offered. The government has said it will sell between 40.1 per cent and 52.2 per cent, plus a further 7.8 per cent if demand is high.
Chuka Umunna, Labour’s shadow business secretary, wrote on Saturday in an open letter to Vince Cable, the business secretary, that taxpayers “may lose out to the tune of half a billion pounds” in the privatisation.
He asked Mr Cable to clarify several things, including whether the Royal Mail’s property portfolio had been valued independently at its full open market value for property development and why this had not been disclosed in the offering prospectus.