New York-based community site operator FortuneCity.com Inc will debut on Frankfurt’s specialized small cap exchange, the Neuer Markt, today, becoming only the second purely internet stock to list there.
The listing follows an initial public offering in which some 7.5 million shares, including a greenshoe, were sold at 15 euros ($16.47) each, with the company’s part of the proceeds (excluding shares sold by the founders) representing some 85m euros ($93.37m).
FortuneCity CEO Peter Macnee said the company actually started life as European, having been founded in London in March 1997. We moved to the US because of the lower rates charged on bandwidth, the software development resources available and the internet advertising dollars being spent there, he explained. That said, the company sees its future development very much in a European context, and indeed, the funds raised from the IPO will be used for sales and marketing efforts in Europe.
FortuneCity runs an advertising-driven community site, on which common interests attract people to become ‘citizens’ of particular districts within it. This enables them to access a number of free services, including web rings, chat rooms, and email, as well as building their own web pages with tools FortuneCity provides free. In exchange, the citizens agree to allow the company to place banner advertising on their pages.
The company currently has some 1.2 million citizens on its existing sites, containing around 3 million pages of information and driving around 4.5 million visitors. Macnee said that, after starting out with an English-language site, FortuneCity has already launched versions in German and Swedish, and is now preparing ones in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch for later this year. FortuneCity had revenues of $1.4m in 1998, and expects to report at least $11.2m this year.
