TOKYO (Reuters) – Kioxia Holdings Corp, the world’s second-largest flash memory chipmaker, said on Monday it would postpone plans for an initial public offering (IPO) amid uncertainty in the global chip market stemming from U.S-China tensions.
“While we received significant interest from many investors, the lead underwriters and Kioxia do not believe it is in the best interest of current or prospective shareholders to proceed with the IPO at this time of continued market volatility and ongoing concerns about a second wave of the pandemic,” Kioxia CEO and President Nobuo Hayasaka said in a statement.
“As a company, we make disciplined decisions that are in the best interest of all our stakeholders and we will revisit an IPO at an appropriate time. We are not in a rush,” he said.
The move came after Kioxia earlier this month set a tentative price range for an IPO in Tokyo that put the market value lower than 2 trillion yen ($18.94 billion), the price that a Bain Capital-led group paid for the company two years ago.
Kioxia, formerly known as Toshiba Memory, had planned to list on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Oct. 6, offering up to 334.3 billion yen ($3.19 billion) in shares in what would have been Japan’s biggest IPO this year.
(Reporting by Takashi Umekawa and Makiko Yamazaki; Editing by Chang-Ran Kim)
