Online greeting card publisher, Moonpig, is seeking flotation for a value above £1 billion on the London stock market, as it moves to take advantage of a lockdown-driven surge in demand for its products.
Revenues at the company, which claims to have a 60 percent share of the UK’s world-leading greeting card market, reached £173 million in the year to April 2020, followed by £156 million in the half-year to October 2020.
It has a customer base of around 12 million, many of whom were attracted by Moonpig’s strong card personalisation offering. It not only intends to target an expansion of this customer base, but to position itself as a technology business, using customer data and predictive technology.
In September of last year Moonpig launched a major expansion of its publisher programme, extending further into non-personalised greeting cards. It also put out a call for creative inhouse talent in the drive to refresh its 12,000 plus portfolio with a constant stream of new designs.
Former WHSmith chief executive, Kate Swann, is chairwoman of the company, to which she brings her experience of running a listed company.
The head of Moonpig, Nickyl Raithatha said: “As the leaders of the accelerating shift to online, now is the perfect time for us to bring the company to the public market.”
Private equity owners of the company, which operates in Britain and Ireland as Moonpig and as Greetz in the Netherlands, are targeting a free float of at least 25 percent. It is the latest in a series of London listings planned for this year as confidence in the market picks up with the vaccine rollout. Dr Martens, Darktrace, Deliveroo and TransferWise are also on track to list later this year.
The fortunes of Moonpig are somewhat better than those of high street greeting card chains, with Paperchase filing a notice of intention to appoint administrators earlier this year.
