German e-commerce solution vendor Intershop AG will go public via an initial public offering of 1.8 million shares at DM100 ($55.86) each on the Deutsche Borse’s Neuer Markt, which specializes in start-ups, particularly those in the IT sector. The shares were 40 times oversubscribed. Intershop was founded in the East German city of Jena in 1992 by university dropout Stephan Schambach, who later moved to Burlingame, California, when the company opened its US-incorporated holding company there. Today, it has offices in the UK, France, Australia, Singapore, Brazil and Canada, as well as the US and Germany. The company had sales last year of $5.7m, a figure it had already surpassed in the first five months of this year. Intershop’s Mall software enables up to 300 ‘shopfronts’ to be hosted on one server, a solution which has found favor, particularly with merchants who can’t afford a dedicated server of their own, opting instead to lease space from an internet service provider. The software runs on Windows NT and four flavors of Unix, supporting electronic payments systems such as CyberCash and OM Transact .
