KYODO NEWS



 

Japanese chipmaker Kioxia Holdings Corp. debuted on the Tokyo stock market Wednesday, with its opening price falling short of its initial offering price of 1,455 yen ($9) in one of Japan's biggest IPOs this year.

Shares of Kioxia opened at 1,440 yen on the first day of trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's top-tier Prime Market, giving the Japanese chipmaker a market capitalization of around 776 billion yen.

The listing marks the second-largest IPO in Japan this year after Tokyo Metro, which debuted in October.

Seeing the opening price below the initial offering price, Kazuyoshi Saito, a senior analyst at Iwai Cosmo Securities, said the debut "marked a calm start."
 
"As the performance of chips is highly dependent on market trends, many investors probably took a wait-and-see approach," Saito said.
 
The company, which was formerly Toshiba Corp.'s memory chip business, issued 21.56 million new shares in going public to secure about 29 billion yen.
 
Major shareholders Bain Capital, a U.S. private equity firm, and Toshiba also sold part of their stakes, with Bain's ownership falling from 56 percent to 51 percent and Toshiba's from 40 percent to 30 percent.
 
In 2018, Toshiba sold its former chip-making unit, Toshiba Memory Corp., to a consortium led by Bain Capital for around 2 trillion yen as part of its restructuring efforts. The chip company was later renamed Kioxia.
 
The company gained approval in 2020 to go public, but it repeatedly postponed its listing as heightened U.S.-China trade tensions clouded its business outlook. Its market capitalization at the time was estimated at over 1.5 trillion yen.