(BFM Bourse) – Listing on the stock exchange can provide employees of small and medium-sized businesses with additional liquidity, and thus associate them with the performance of the company to which they have contributed.
Since the start of the year, the number of companies that have entered the Paris Stock Exchange is more than anecdotal. To date, only Pluxee, the new company bringing together the meal voucher activities separated from Sodexo, has thrown itself into the stock market, making it the biggest IPO since Française des Jeux (FDJ) in 2019 .
And as for small and medium-sized companies, none have yet expressed their desire to try the adventure of listing on Euronext Growth. To find entertainment, you must therefore look at Euronext Access, the least restrictive compartment in the Euronext galaxy.
This week, Euronext Access rolled out the red carpet for Macompta.fr, a leading software publisher for structures with fewer than 20 employees. This is the first French company since January to take its first steps on the stock market in this compartment. Before the French accounting specialist founded in 2007, only two Spanish companies have tried their luck on Euronext Access since the start of the year.
Macompta.fr entered Euronext Access by direct listing, a simple and quick way to enter the stock market compared to other existing methods, with a view to gaining notoriety and strengthening its presence on its domestic market.
“Macompta.fr having a strong growth trajectory, high margins and available cash, the need for financing did not guide the choice of shareholders towards the Stock Exchange but rather liquidity, even limited, and notoriety”, explains Cécile Aboulian, Equity Capital Market Director at In Extenso.
Euronext Access is in fact aimed at start-ups and SMEs “seeking to benefit from the advantages of the IPO to finance their growth and gain notoriety, but which do not meet the admission criteria on the Euronext or Euronext Growth”, explains Euronext.
The Stock Exchange, a tool for employee loyalty
In addition to notoriety, and this speed of the process, such a rating method makes it possible to put in place potential effective incentive tools for employees such as employee shareholding plans allowing them to be involved in the life of their company.
Small and medium-sized entities can also involve their employees in their development project. The 2019 Pacte law also strengthens the attractiveness of employee shareholding for this type of company, especially for those operating on the financial markets.
And this is the case with Macompta.fr. The company is counting on this employee shareholding program to “recruit and retain talent”. “Our listing on Euronext Access is a first step to support our projects, develop our reputation, involve our employees in our success and welcome new investors in this great adventure,” declares Sylvain Heurtier, president and founder of Macompta.fr.
“As such, we offer our employees with more than three years of service the opportunity to have free shares. Having free shares is good but you have to know how much it is worth and be able to resell them. The Stock Exchange is thus a natural complement to employee shareholding”, continues the manager.
Still in the world of small and mid-caps, Stif also announced this Thursday the implementation of a free share allocation plan barely four months after its IPO on Euronext Growth. This program concerns 1% of the capital of the explosion protection specialist and will benefit all of its employees in France, in order to involve them in the future growth of the company.
“This operation is part of management’s desire to involve them in the creation of value and allow them to become shareholders. With this major plan, our ambition is to strengthen their support for the group’s expansion project, to retain them and ensure the success of current and future developments, particularly in the very strong growth market for BESS (battery energy storage systems) in renewable energies”, indicated José Burgos, Chairman and Director general of Stif.
In Japan, employee shareholding incentive plans have also flourished in recent years to attract new talent in a context of labor shortage. Over the last 5 years, the number of Japanese companies that have offered this type of system has doubled to close to 1000 (996 to be exact). And that’s a quarter of the 3,900 companies listed on the Tokyo stock market, according to a Nomura study published last September, cited by Reuters.
A tool popular with shareholders and non-shareholders alike
In France, employee shareholding also enjoys great notoriety since this system is known by more than three quarters of employees of large companies (77%), according to a joint study by Diot-Siaci Institute and Natixis Interentreprises published in October 2023 .
For more than half of the employees surveyed (52%), employee shareholding is seen as a unifying system which benefits both the company and the employees. Among them, 78% believe that it improves the overall performance of the company and 82% consider that it is an effective way to attract and retain employees.
Companies also have everything to gain by involving their employees in their capital. For 73% of those questioned, it contributes, in the same way as other tools such as profit-sharing, to better sharing of value. This explains a significant number of candidates for employee shareholding. Among the non-shareholder employees surveyed, 67% would be interested in acquiring shares.
More than a third of employees in the SBF 120 (a stock market index including CAC 40 companies as well as 80 other companies, which collectively represent more than 80% of the capitalization of the Parisian market), are shareholders in their company, revealed the latest overview of employee shareholding produced every year since 2006 by the Eres firm.
Sabrina Sadgui – ©2024 BFM Bourse