Swvl, the Egyptian mass transit and shared mobility services provider, has begun trading on the Nasdaq. The firm’s co-founder and chief executive Mostafa Kandil rang the opening bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York City’s Times Square to mark the occasion.
Trading opened at 9.30 am EST with shares starting at $9.95 per share. They were trading at $9.33 at 3.10 pm EST.
The listing follows the approval of a merger with special purpose acquisition company (Spac) Queen’s Gambit Growth Capital, the first blank-cheque company led entirely by women, at a recent shareholders’ meeting.
The planned merger was announced in July last year. Swvl is the second Arab technology company to be listed on Nasdaq after music streaming platform Anghami, which was also floated through a Spac in February.
“The key thing for us is that we’re the first tech-enabled mass transit player to list on any exchange globally — so not just the first out of the Middle East, we’re the first out of the entire world”, Chief Financial Officer Youssef Salem said.
Swvl Holdings’ ordinary shares and warrants commenced trading under the ticker symbols GMBT and GMBTW. However, this has changed as shares and warrants are now being traded under SWVL and SWVLW. This kicked off on Friday (1st April 2022).
The expected proceeds from the listing will total $640 million, including $160m in immediate capital and $480m over the next few weeks if certain closing conditions are met.
Salem said. “We’re getting the public currency that allows us to recruit the best talent and do all of the M&A that we wanted to do. And we have long-term investors who really want to see through the execution and value creation.”
Before the listing, Swvl pre-funded approximately $70m in a $121.5m Pipe (private investment in public equity) offering. Investors include Agility, Chimera, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Luxor Capital and Zain.
Founded in 2017 by Mostafa Kandil, Mahmoud Nouh and Ahmed Sabbah, Swvl allows commuters to reserve seats on private buses operating on fixed routes and pay fares through its mobile app.
Swvl now offers intercity, intracity, business-to-business and business-to-government transport across more than 100 cities in more than 20 countries.
The company is planning to expand to several countries over the next six months, including Colombia, Peru, Mexico, South Africa and the US.
In August, Swvl launched in Europe and Brazil through its acquisition of Shotl, a Spanish Uber-like service for bus and van operators.
The firm also acquired a controlling stake in South American firm Viapool in November, granting the company access to Argentina and Chile and paving its entry into Brazil and Mexico.
This month, Swvl acquired door2door, a European high-growth mobility platform that has a 24 per cent market share in Germany.
Salem adds: “We’re growing double-digit month by month. Since we valued the deal at the time of the Spac, we have grown more than three times just from that point in time. We’ve beaten our estimates three quarters in a row and we’ve raised our estimates for the year, so we feel very confident about the valuation from a company earnings perspective.”
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