The public offer of OzEmail Ltd shares on the Australian Stock Exchange, scheduled for 12 noon on Friday May 29, is not quite as altruistic as the company has tried to paint it (CI No 3,414). As well as giving local investors a crack at Australia’s biggest internet service provider, the listing complies with terms set when OzEmail acquired rival Access One last November (CI No 3,287). OzEmail paid US$3.5m cash and 10.5 million ordinary shares for Access One, whose owners, Solution 6 Holdings, made it a condition of the sale that those shares be tradeable on the ASX. Today’s float of 3 million ordinary shares, drawn from the holdings of co-founders and majority shareholders Sean Howard, Malcolm Turnbull and Trevor Kennedy, is a drop in the bucket for OzEmail. The shares equate to about 300,000 American Depository Shares, and the company has ten times that number listed on Nasdaq. The entire ASX float represents about a day’s Nasdaq trading on OzEmail. Little wonder that the company says it will turn again to America when it seeks another capital infusion. The principals still doubt whether Australia has a capital market for technology companies at all.
