Stemmer Imaging has announced plans to float new and existing common shares on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.
The company is expected to be listed in the first half of 2018. The public offer will only be made in Germany.
The company expects issue proceeds of around €50 million to be generated from placing new shares in connection with the public offering.
Stemmer Imaging aims to use the proceeds to finance growth and to develop its service portfolio, especially by expanding into new areas of application for its machine vision software, Common Vision Blox.
The company, headquartered in Puchheim near Munich in Germany, has 30 years of experience in the machine vision business. It has 260 employees in 19 countries in Europe, and generated sales revenues of €88.3 million in the 2017 fiscal year. The company has grown annually by 12 per cent on average since 2013.
At the time of publication, SI Holding, a Primepulse company, holds all the shares in Stemmer Imaging AG. It will continue to hold at least 51 per cent of the shares in the company after the initial public offering capital increase is carried out and the existing shares are sold in a secondary offering, and in the event that the greenshoe option is exercised.
The executive board is made up of Christof Zollitsch, CEO, and Martin Kersting, CTO, as well as Lars Böhrnsen, who joined the board as CFO in November 2017.
Zollitsch and Kersting were both shareholders when Wilhelm Stemmer sold his shares in Stemmer Imaging to Munich-based AL-KO in July 2017; the management team acquired 24.96 per cent in the company as part of AL-KO transaction.
In a statement released by Stemmer Imaging, Zollitsch said: ‘Stemmer Imaging has grown very successfully over the past few years. We are now in a very good position to profit from the continued growth of the market for digital machine vision. In the coming years, we plan to boost our growth through focused international expansion, and improve our profitability in a targeted way by means of concept and product innovations. We are convinced that an initial public offering is the next step for us to take in order to drive our growth strategy.’
As part of its growth plans, the company stated that it wants to continue to provide solutions to its clients’ requirements, particularly in view of the growing challenges of the digital world, such as embedded vision and hyperspectral imaging.
Additionally, it was stated that Stemmer Imaging plans to continue making further company acquisitions in the future, in both machine vision and non-industrial applications that use technologies complementary to machine vision, such as the entertainment, transport and food industries.
Stemmer Imaging is supported by a supervisory board chaired by Klaus Weinmann, with Stefan Kober as deputy chairperson, both of whom are co-founders of holding company Primepulse.
Hauck and Aufhäuser Privatbankiers Aktiengesellschaft will act as the sole global coordinator and sole bookrunner.
