Investors snapped up shares in biotech company Oxford Nanopore after its IPO this morning, with the shares soaring 45 per cent.
Oxford Nanopore shares were trading at 619p at the open, pushing the market cap to £4.93bn.
The initial public offering IPO price was 425p.
The listing marks a significant move for the London Stock Exchange as most British pharma and life science companies tend to list on New York’s Nasdaq.
The company, which specialises in DNA sequencing and provides rapid COVID-19 tests to Britain’s national health services, sold 524 million pounds worth of shares in the IPO. It set its issue price towards the upper end of an earlier range
Oxford Nanopore had planned to issue 82.4 million new shares, raising 350 million pounds, while existing shareholders sold 41 million shares, it said in a statement.
