United Internet, Warburg to Seek Up to €500 Million in Ionos IPO

Swetha Gopinath, Aaron Kirchfeld and Eyk Henning, Bloomberg News

Signage for the Frankfurt Stock Exchange Photograph: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg Photographer: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- United Internet AG and Warburg Pincus are planning to raise as much as €500 million ($545 million) from the Frankfurt listing of web hosting business Ionos Group, people familiar with the matter said.

Ionos’s owners are considering seeking a potential market value of as much as €3.4 billion for the unit, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing confidential information.

They’ll likely float about 15% of Ionos in the offering, according to the people, who said that the bookbuild for the share sale could launch as soon as Monday.

While the current plan is to go ahead with the listing, no final decision has been made and the size and timing of the deal could still change.

Representatives for United Internet and Warburg Pincus declined to comment.

United Internet owns about 75% of Ionos, with Warburg Pincus holding the remainder. Ionos’s listing is being seen as a litmus test for shareholder appetite in Europe’s moribund IPO market, which was effectively shut last year as rising interest rates and inflation kept investors on the sidelines.

Ionos, whose publicly traded peers include GoDaddy Inc. and Squarespace Inc., focuses on small and medium-sized enterprises in Europe and North America. It also runs a fast-growing cloud business that competes with firms including France’s OVH Groupe SAS and New York-listed DigitalOcean Holdings Inc.

The Ionos IPO is being led by joint global coordinators JPMorgan Chase & Co., Deutsche Bank AG, Berenberg and BNP Paribas SA. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Barclays Plc are joint bookrunners.

--With assistance from Agatha Cantrill.