Turkey's Hepsiburada makes $3.6B strong Nasdaq debut

Hepsiburada is one of the Turkey's largest e-commerce platform that allows consumers to order items ranging from groceries and essentials to airline tickets with nine million active customers.

Turkey's Hepsiburada supplies 500,000 surgical masks and examination gloves for healthcare personnel to combat Covid-19 pandemic in Istanbul, Turkey on March 31, 2020.
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Turkey's Hepsiburada supplies 500,000 surgical masks and examination gloves for healthcare personnel to combat Covid-19 pandemic in Istanbul, Turkey on March 31, 2020.

Shares of Hepsiburada rose more than 6 percent in their US stock market debut, giving the Turkish e-commerce platform a market capitalisation of $3.65 billion in one of the busiest weeks for the US capital market this year.

Hepsiburada's American Depositary Shares (ADS) on Thursday opened at $12.75, compared with their initial public offering (IPO) price of $12 per ADS. 

Each ADS represents one Class B ordinary share.

The company sold 56.7 million ADSs earlier in the day to raise more than $680 million, with existing shareholders putting up a little over 15 million of the shares on offer.

9M active customers

Founded in 2000, Hepsiburada allows consumers to order items ranging from groceries and essentials to airline tickets on its online platform.

The company launched its marketplace in 2015 and has an in-house logistics network. It had 9 million active customers in 2020, a regulatory filing showed.

Hepsiburada's revenue and gross merchandise value, which refers to the total value of products sold, more than doubled in 2020 compared with a year earlier, the filing showed.

The company enters the US stock market in one of 2021's busiest weeks for market debuts. Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Global Inc's debut on Wednesday marked the biggest US listing by a Chinese company since 2014.

Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs & Co, BofA Securities and UBS Securities were the underwriters for Hepsiburada's offering.

READ MORE: E-commerce on the rise as Amazon launches in Turkey

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