By Rocky Swift and Daniel Leussink
TOKYO (Reuters) -Lunar transportation start-up ispace Inc had a blistering market debut in Tokyo on Wednesday as investors scrambled to buy shares in the company that aims to land the first commercial probe on the moon.
Such was the glut of buy orders and demand to hold the shares that they went untraded all day.
They were being quoted at their daily upper price limit of 585 yen at the end of the session on the Tokyo stock exchange’s growth market, more than double the initial public offer price of 254 yen.
When a stock is untraded due to a glut of buy orders, it is given a “forced” closing price by the exchange that reflects the balance of buy and sell orders.
Analysts said investors bid for the shares of ispace, which raised 6.7 billion yen ($50 million) in its IPO, because its lunar development and transportation business fits in with Japan’s national policy of defence and space development.
Japan is boosting spending in those areas, which in turn makes investors bullish, said Tastunori Kawai, chief strategist at AU Kabucom Securities.
“IPOs that fit with national policy themes tend to be successful, as is the case with biotech ventures,” he said.
In December, the start-up’s Hakuto-R Mission 1 lunar lander was launched aboard a SpaceX rocket that took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying two robotic rovers.
ispace said in a statement on Wednesday that it expected the lander to touch down on the moon’s surface at 1640 GMT on April 25, at the earliest. The vehicle is currently orbiting the moon at an altitude of 100 kms (62.14 miles).
If successful, it will mark the first ever lunar landing by a private company. Only the governments of the United States, Russia and China have nailed such a feat, with landing attempts by India and a private Israeli company ending in failure in recent years.
LUNAR COLONY
ispace is working with spacecraft software firm Draper to help bring NASA payloads to the moon from 2025 and is targeting building a permanently staffed lunar colony by 2040.
“We’ve gotten a lot of attention from many people including shareholders and investors and renewed our desire to steadily expand our business in the future,” Takeshi Hakamada, ispace’s founder and chief executive, told reporters.
The company had intended to raise around 6 billion yen in its IPO, but later boosted the size of the share sale.
It sold 26.5 million shares in the increased IPO. There was a greenshoe option of up to 1.2 million shares. With 80.4 million shares outstanding, the company reached a market capitalisation of about 47 billion yen after the shares rose by their daily limit.
$1 = 133.6900 yen)
(Reporting by Rocky Swift, Daniel Leussink, Mariko Katsumura and David Dolan; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell, Jamie Freed and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)