The company will offer 50% of its capital to institutional and individual investors in a two-stage offering process.

Leading Qatari IT services company MEEZA is the first company in the Gulf state’s financial market to use book-building to determine its initial public offering (IPO), the firm announced on Sunday.

Book-building is a mechanism used globally to identify the company’s price of security prior to offering shares for sale in an IPO. The Doha-based company will now be able to adopt book-building starting from next week after receiving the approval from the Qatar Financial Markets Authority.

MEEZA will offer 50% of its capital to institutional and individual investors in a two-stage offering process, it said, the first of which will take place between 15 and 26 January.

The second stage involves offering shares for public subscription to both individual and institutional investors based on the mechanism’s price between 12 and 23 February. 

The offering price range stands between QAR 2.61 to QAR 2.81 per share and the total offering size is expected to be between QAR 846,918,900 and QAR 911,816,900, the company said.

Doha-based investment bank QInvest is also acting as the listing advisor and offering manager on the potential IPO.

The Gulf state had introduced regulations for book-building last year as part of wider efforts to attract foreign investors to its market. 

Some of the key policies introduced in a bid to attract foreign investments included allowing 100 % foreign investors ownership of companies. The policy led to a spike in the volume of domestic and foreign investments.

Foreign direct investments

In 2021 alone, Qatar’s foreign direct investment (FDI) increased by 27% in comparison to 2020.

Last week, Qatar ranked first among 50 of the world’s top destinations for FDI, with a 70% annual growth between 2019 and 2022, per a new report by fDi Intelligence.

The report listed the top FDI sectors as oil and gas, financial services, and software and information technology.

It noted that the energy crisis in light of the war in Ukraine, which saw European countries abandon reliance on Russian gas, strengthened Qatar’s role as a top exporter of liquified natural gas (LNG).

The mega North Field expansion project, the largest of its kind, will further strengthen Doha’s position as a LNG giant in the industry. The project ​​is expected to increase Qatar’s LNG production capacity to 126 million tonnes per annum by 2027.

The report added that Qatar also found “itself in the spotlight of the FIFA World Cup at a time when the local economy has plenty of wind in its sails.”