Shares in Elice, a South Korean AI data centre company, fell 32% on their first day of trading in Seoul on Tuesday. It was the worst debut on record for a Korean IPO of $100m or more, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, as Yoolim Lee and Youkyung Lee reported.
Elice raised 201.1bn won ($151m) in the IPO, Reuters reported, citing the company’s filing. It sold 2.22 million new shares at 90,500 won each, the top of its range. The stock opened at 75,700 won on the Kosdaq, fell as low as 58,000 won and closed at 61,500 won.
The Elice IPO was the biggest on the Kosdaq this year. In Korea, only K Bank’s $337m listing in March raised more.
A 400-times oversubscribed flop
Demand had looked strong. The retail tranche was 400 times oversubscribed, and individual investors put about 10.3tn won into subscription deposits, Bloomberg reported.
Most of them received few shares. Retail investors got 25% of the offering, worth about 50.3bn won. Based on the closing price, they lost about $12m on the day, Bloomberg calculated.
“Retail investors may have blindly believed that IPO stocks would always go up,” Jo Hyunik, an investment division manager at Iroom Investment Advisors in Seoul, told Bloomberg.
The benchmark Kospi closed 4% lower on the day, Business Insider reported. Samsung Electronics fell 3% and SK Hynix 4%.
From coding classes to AI cloud
Three KAIST doctoral students founded Elice in 2015 as a coding education platform. It later moved into AI cloud infrastructure, selling servers, liquid cooling, networking and software. It now builds modular data centres for dense clusters of AI chips.
Elice is profitable. Its prospectus, as cited by Bloomberg, showed first-half revenue up 200% to 34.4bn won and an operating profit of 10.3bn won. Vertex Ventures and Altos Ventures back Elice.
“We’re going all-in on becoming a full-stack AI infrastructure leader globally,” chief executive Jae Won Kim told Bloomberg. “This IPO is about giving ourselves the financial firepower to execute.”
Kim said Elice will spend the money on more AI data centres in South Korea and abroad.
Caught in the neocloud selloff
Elice is a neocloud, one of the companies that rent out AI computing power. Investors are losing faith in the group, Bloomberg reported. CoreWeave’s shares and bonds fell sharply last week over its debt. Australia’s Firmus dropped its planned ASX float, and Nscale faces investor pushback on its IPO valuation, Bloomberg has reported.
“Sentiment toward AI infrastructure has been highly volatile and often disconnected from underlying fundamentals,” Albert Yong, chief investment officer at Petra Capital Management, told Bloomberg.
Kim Dojoon, chief executive of Zian Investment Management, told Bloomberg that Elice’s finances differ from CoreWeave’s and that investors need not see it as “particularly risky”. He said it was not yet clear whether Elice could stay as profitable.