Cin­e­maONE Gem­stone 4DX CEO and di­rec­tor In­grid Jahra is pleased the com­pa­ny has raised near­ly half of some $30.8 mil­lion it is seek­ing from its first ini­tial pub­lic of­fer­ing (IPO).

The com­pa­ny, the first to be list­ed on the Small and Medi­um En­ter­prise Mar­ket on the Trinidad and To­ba­go Stock Ex­change, of­fered an ini­tial 3,088,373 shares but sold 1,444,168 at $10 per share.

Cin­e­maONE’s IPO has there­fore raised over $14 mil­lion but was un­der­sub­scribed by just over 50 per cent.

The IPO is now closed af­ter it was ex­tend­ed for an ad­di­tion­al week.

List­ing and trad­ing of the com­pa­ny’s shares are ex­pect­ed to be­gin on No­vem­ber 14, un­der the sym­bol ‘CINE 1.’ Cin­e­maONE will al­so emerge as the first en­ter­tain­ment stock on the TTSE.

The Of­fer For Sale of 3,088,373 shares of no par val­ue at $10 per share was suc­cess­ful in rais­ing in ex­cess of the min­i­mum re­quired net pro­ceeds of the Of­fer For Sale, as out­lined in the ap­proved prospec­tus.

All suc­cess­ful ap­pli­cants will thus re­ceive their full al­lot­ment, which is 100 per cent of their ap­pli­ca­tion, Jahra con­firmed.

“We are quite hap­py. It does al­low us to con­tin­ue with those plans we had pro­posed and that’s al­so part of what we’re do­ing now, which is ac­cel­er­at­ing all those ac­tiv­i­ties,” Jahra said.

The newest Cin­e­maOne in the works will be in Gulf City, La Ro­maine, with an es­ti­mat­ed open­ing date at the end of the sec­ond quar­ter of 2019, in time for the sum­mer block­buster movie sea­son.

Jahra said the com­pa­ny has al­ready be­gun ex­plor­ing ways to source the re­main­ing funds, which may in­clude loans from com­mer­cial banks and ven­ture cap­i­tal.

“We will go ahead with the plans. It just means we would not be able to use all the eq­ui­ty on all the ex­pan­sion but on some parts of it. IPO is one way of rais­ing cap­i­tal, so you use the oth­er chan­nels. You raise some here which is great but you still con­tin­ue to go to the debt mar­ket and find the funds there as well,” Jahra said.

She ex­plained that the IPO al­so al­lows for a “big­ger base to start with” as the com­pa­ny’s worth has in­creased.

“And then you have those funds which you can now lever­age to go for­ward with to raise, so that’s how we would pro­ceed,” Jahra added.

At the same time, she said the com­pa­ny’s re­spon­si­bil­i­ty was now in­creased giv­en its re­cent ad­di­tion of share­hold­ers.

“We in­tend to make good, to make all best ef­forts. Our south lo­ca­tion is al­ready un­der­way. You can dri­ve past the car park and see the shell, it’s al­most com­plet­ed,” Jahra said.

Asked whether there might have been a bet­ter re­sponse if the IPO was put out be­fore Gov­ern­ment’s Na­tion­al In­vest­ment Fund (NIF) was is­sued, she said one might nev­er know.

“We were ready but our lead bro­ker had to deal with what they had to deal with be­fore them, which was NIF. You could look at it now and maybe say we should have wait­ed, but the tim­ing of every­thing is al­ways very dif­fi­cult to fore­cast so we re­al­ly don’t know,” Jahra said.

“What would be in­ter­est­ing is now that there’s been a NIF bond and now there’s the first SME list­ed, I know that they have fore­cast to have a hous­ing bond. Let’s see what that will be the up­take be­cause now there’s quite a lot of ac­tiv­i­ty in the mar­ket.”

First Cit­i­zens Bro­ker­age Ad­vi­so­ry Ser­vices was the lead bro­ker for Cin­e­maONE Ltd’s in­au­gur­al SME IPO.

Cin­e­maONE Ltd is an en­ter­tain­ment com­pa­ny that of­fers dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed and in­no­v­a­tive dig­i­tal cin­e­ma en­ter­tain­ment in mul­ti­ple, pre­mi­um movie for­mats, in­clud­ing the Dig­i­cel IMAX The­atre, Gem­stone VIP Cin­e­mas and the 4DX The­atre.