Press · Kauppalehti · 2024-12-08 · In Finnish
Can a Share Issue Be Aimed at One City? — Sami Miettinen in Kauppalehti
Published as “Yhtiöitä pörssiin listaava Sami Miettinen kertoo, voisiko listautumisannin oikeasti suunnata vain helsinkiläisille”
Hosted by: Henriikka Korte
Henriikka Korte put a specific question to Miettinen for Kauppalehti’s markets section: could a listing actually be aimed at the residents of a single city?
The context was a proposal by Mikael Jungner — Kreab’s chief executive, a National Coalition municipal candidate — that Helsinki should float its energy company Helen, selling roughly a third of the shares in a directed issue that favoured Helsinki residents, possibly at a modest discount. Miettinen gives Jungner credit for the idea being a fresh one, then explains why it does not work.
The legal answer
A directed share issue requires a particularly weighty reason under the Finnish Companies Act. Living in Helsinki is not one — “Helsinkiläisyys ei ole painava peruste”, as he puts it.
He adds a practical objection that is easy to overlook: you would have to collect reliable evidence of each subscriber’s municipality of residence, which an offering is not built to do.
What an offering can do
The distinction he draws is between allocation and price, and it is the part worth keeping.
A conventional listing does divide subscribers into groups — typically the listing company’s own staff, the retail public, and institutions such as pension insurers and family offices. Those groups can legitimately be treated differently in how many shares each receives: a set pot for staff, another for retail, a third for institutions.
What should not vary, in his reading of the spirit of the Companies Act, is the price. The one defensible exception is the company’s own employees, who may be offered a discount — the ten per cent Jungner was reaching for is exactly the sort of figure that belongs there, just aimed at staff rather than at a city.
The half that matters more
Having answered the question, Miettinen reframes it. The premise behind “who should we let in” is that demand needs rationing, and he thinks that premise is simply wrong in the current market.
His worked example is Tamtron, the weighing-technology company listed two years earlier: what made that offering work was anchor investors committing to more than half the shares on offer before it opened. Getting an offering to succeed is difficult professional work — unless, he notes drily, you underprice it.
Right now he describes Finnish listings as frozen. His diagnosis is structural rather than cyclical: private investors here are not wealthy enough, and the institutions are too large to take positions in small-company IPOs at all. The question he then asks himself out loud — whether this country has private capitalists — he answers in the negative, and attributes it to a combination of low wealth and heavy taxation.
Why this one is worth filing
Miettinen is a partner at Translink Corporate Finance and has worked on Helsinki listings since Nokian Renkaat in 1995, which is what makes the answer a practitioner’s rather than a commentator’s.
The mechanics behind the short answers here — how anchor demand is built before an offering opens, what a cut-back option does, why allocation between retail and institutions is constrained, and why an offering that clears at a discount is not the same as one that succeeds — are set out at length in his inderesPodi 122 appearance, recorded in 2022 with Sauli Vilén.
The full article is on kauppalehti.fi.
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