Media monitoring business iSentia will have a market capitalisation of $408 million when it lists on the Australian Securities Exchange next month.
The company's prospectus shows owner Quadrant Private Equity will retain 25 per cent of the company, while new investors will control around 70 per cent of the stock.
Shares will be issued at $2.04, which reflects a multiple of 11 times forecast earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation on an enterprise value basis.
The Australian Financial Review's Street Talk reported that iSentia attracted strong support from institutional investors in a bookbuild earlier this month. It will raise $283.5 million.
iSentia tracks editorial content across social media, broadcast, print and online. Its clients are mostly big companies, governments and, to a lesser extent, ad agencies ¬seeking to stay abreast of how they are being talked about, industry issues and comments on their peers. The company also operates in Asia after a series of acquisitions over the past decade.
iSentia's EBITDA is expected to grow by 32 per cent to $30.2 million in fiscal 2014 on a pro forma basis. Joint lead advisers Macquarie and UBS have fully underwritten the IPO.
The fallout from the floats of Myer in 2009 and Collins Foods in 2011 still lingers and most of the private-equity-sponsored IPOs over the past year have involved some residual ownership stake.
Unlike its rivals, Quadrant has enjoyed a blemish-free run at the boards, with the float of its IVF business Virtus Health in June 2013 as well as last month's IPO of the automotive parts company Burson Group both performing well.
"iSentia has a strong financial track record and benefits from a capital expenditure-light, high cash flow business with strong predictability of revenues," iSentia chairman Doug Flynn said.
"iSentia's product and services platform, which has a largely fixed cost base, is highly scalable and enables iSentia to generate high incremental profit margins from additional software and services sold."
(First published in The Australian Financial Review, 21 May 2014)