#BTS label Big Hit Entertainment prices IPO at top of price range

The South Korean record label behind the wildly popular K-pop band BTS priced its initial public offering at the top of its target range after a flurry of interest from investors.

Seoul-based Big Hit Entertainment will list its shares at 135,000 won, or roughly $115, apiece when it goes public on the Korean stock exchange next month, the company said in a Monday regulatory filing.

Institutional investors reportedly showed interest in more than 1,000 times the number of shares available to them in the offering as Big Hit sought to capitalize on BTS’s international success. Retail investors and dedicated fans of the band are also eager to buy shares in what’s expected to be South Korea’s hottest IPO of the year, Reuters reported.

The high IPO price will also benefit BTS’s seven members, who were each given 68,385 shares in Big Hit in August. Their stakes will be worth a combined 64.6 billion won — or more than $55.3 million — at the planned offering price.

The pricing gives Bit Hit a valuation of roughly 4.8 trillion won, or about $4.1 billion. The company expects to raise 962.6 billion won (some $820 million) from the offering of more than 7.1 million shares, making it South Korea’s biggest IPO since biotech firm Celltrion Healthcare raised 1 trillion won in 2017.

Big Hit reported a profit of 49.7 billion won ($42.4 million) for the first half of 2020 thanks to online concert and merchandise sales.

BTS — who became the first all-South Korean group with a No. 1 single in the US this month — is a huge plank of Big Hit’s business, accounting for more than 87 percent of its revenue in the first half of the year.

With Post wires