Chilling echoes of the 2001 dotcom crash attended the flotation of the internet price comparison business Moneysupermarket.com at the end of last month. Simon Nixon — not the financial journalist of that name but the company’s founder — was jetting around America and Europe on his roadshow as the market started to wobble, spooked by the American sub-prime lending crisis and the global credit crunch. On the day of the float, 26 July, the market fell nearly 200 points, its largest one-day fall of the year until then. ‘I thought we might have to pull it,’ says Nixon, a man who cherishes being in control. ‘But in the end the demand was there from investors at the lower price range.’
Less brave souls did pull their flotations and, in the event, Moneysupermarket.com was the last IPO to get under the wire before the stock market effectively shut down for the summer. Nixon and his chairman Gerald Corbett (who had seen his share of crises in his time as chairman of both Railtrack and Woolworths) decided that selling at 170p a share — valuing the company at £840 million instead of more than £1 billion at the top-of-the-range 210p their advisers had previously indicated — was better than not selling at all. It meant Nixon himself only netted £102 million by selling part of his stake, instead of nearer to £200 million that was talked about before the float; but there was an additional imperative of needing to repay money borrowed to pay £162 million to Nixon’s co-founder, Duncan Cameron, to buy out his shareholding a few months earlier.
Nixon, a lean, Porsche-driving 39-year-old fitness fanatic, may have had a bumpy entry into public-company life, but it has been business as usual since and he claims to have learnt a great deal from meeting investors in America and Europe.
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