SINGAPORE - Grand Venture Technology opened on the Catalist board at $0.27 on Wednesday morning (Jan 23), below its initial public offering (IPO) price of $0.275 a share.

But the homegrown manufacturing service provider, which was Singapore's first IPO of 2019, bounced back within a quarter-hour of the opening bell and reached $0.28 at 9.16am.

Its offering comprised a public tranche of 800,000 shares, which were subscribed more than 15 times over, as well as a placement of 42.1 million shares. The overall subscription for the IPO was 1.3 times.

Based on the share price, seven-year-old Grand Venture, which serves customers in the semiconductor, analytical life sciences and electronics industries, has a market value of some $65 million.

Grand Venture executive chairman Ricky Lee said in a statement: "Our prudent investments and hard work over the past years are yielding good fruit, and we believe that we can go further by going public."

Mohamed Nasser Ismail, head of equity capital markets at the Singapore Exchange, added: "Singapore is a world-class precision engineering hub, which has evolved over the years to offer more innovation-based and high-value production.

"In this era of high-tech manufacturing, we look forward to working alongside the company as they leverage advanced technology like robotics and make strides into new growth areas such as medical imaging and diagnostics."

CIMB Bank was the sponsor and issue manager for the IPO, while CGS-CIMB Securities was the underwriter and placement agent. With its trading debut, Grand Venture has become the 215th listing on Catalist, the junior board that succeeded Sesdaq in 2007.

Grand Venture was trading at $0.285 as at 9.55am, with 1.66 million shares having changed hands.