Covid-19 didn’t stop coffee group JDE
Peet’s from launching Europe’s biggest initial public offering this year so far
at the end of May.
This was a landmark transaction in several
ways: the only benchmark IPO in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2020 to
date, the largest consumer IPO in EMEA since 2000 and the fifth-largest listing
in EMEA in the past decade.
It was also the first ever €1 billion+ IPO
to be executed virtually, with the fastest-ever bookbuild for an IPO of this
size. The virtual roadshow took just three days compared to the usual two weeks
or so for the more traditional version, protecting against both coronavirus and
market volatility. It confirmed strong investor interest at a time when the
European IPO market is understandably lacklustre.
BNP Paribas was one of three Joint Global Coordinators of the
transaction.
JDE Peet’s, formed by the merger of Jacobs
Douwe Egberts (JDE) and Peet’s Coffee in January 2020, had a combined €6.9
billion sales in 2019 in more than 100 developed and emerging countries. It
owns more than 50 coffee and tea brands including Peet’s Coffee, Jacobs Coffee,
Douwe Egberts, L’Or, Tassimo and Kenco.
“This is a company that doesn’t have a direct
comparison in Europe – it’s unique, very large, and very resilient. There is
not much else out there that investors are looking at so people had time to
engage with this,” Andreas Bernstorff, head of equity capital markets, told the
Financial Times.
This was the 20th Equity Capital
Markets transaction led by BNP Paribas since the onset of the Covid-19 crisis.