by Huw Jones
LONDON (Reuters) – Euronext announced on Tuesday the launch of a new market segment dedicated to high-tech companies in order to highlight their specificities to investors.
This segment called “European Tech Leaders” brings together more than 100 fast-growing companies holding leading positions in their respective markets, including ASML, Just Eat Takeaway.com, Tom Tom and 41 French companies including Ubisoft, Atos and Valneva.
This new segment will have its own index from next month, said the operator of the Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Dublin, Lisbon, Milan and Oslo stock exchanges.
Integration into this segment assumes a capitalization of at least 300 million euros as well as a minimum growth rate for companies weighing less than one billion euros.
The new segment, explains Euronext, will offer new services to non-listed high-growth companies in order to promote their IPO.
In France, the group announced a series of additional initiatives in connection with, among others, Bpifrance and CDC Croissance, the subsidiary of Caisse des dépôts (CDC) dedicated to listed SMEs, which include the creation by the CDC of a investment called to “accompany the IPO of French unicorns on the Paris market”, endowed with 300 million initially with a target of 1.5 billion within five years.
Europe has long sought to have its own stock market capable of competing with the American Nasdaq, to which European and Asian high-tech companies often turn when they go public.
“We are not in competition with the Nasdaq,” Stéphane Boujnah, CEO of Euronext, assured the press on Tuesday. “What we’re trying to do is develop a fundamentally different approach.”
The operator intends to break with the logic of an IPO on a national market to favor a listing at European level and a sectoral approach, he explained.
Deutsche Börse, the operator of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, created the Neuer Markt in 1997, then presented as the European counterpart of the Nasdaq, but this segment collapsed five years later after the bursting of the internet stock bubble.
Euronext claims to bring together more than 700 listed companies in the field of high technologies for a total market capitalization of 1,500 billion euros. Of the 212 companies that entered one of the group’s markets last year, more than half were from the technology sector, he said.
(Report Huw Jones, French version Marc Angrand, edited by Kate Entringer)