Fitell Corp. (FTEL), the Australian online fitness equipment retailer, priced its micro-cap IPO at $5.00 – the low end of its $5.00-to-$6.00 range – on 3.0 million shares – the number in the prospectus – to raise $15.0 million on Monday night (Aug. 7, 2023). Fitell’s stock opened flat at $5.00 at 10:45 a.m. EDT today (Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023) on the NASDAQ. The stock closed today at $5.05, up 5 cents or up 1 percent in its first day of NASDAQ trading. (Editor’s Note: This column, published early Tuesday, was updated with news on Fitell’s NASDAQ debut and Foremost’s delay.)
Revere Securities and R.F. Lafferty & Co. were the joint book-runners of Fitell’s IPO.
Fitell’s micro-cap, a carry-over from last week, tops a light IPO Calendar of only five deals for the week of Aug. 7, 2023. One deal is a NASDAQ uplisting – Foremost Lithium Resource & Technology Ltd. (FMST proposed), a Canadian exploration-stage lithium mining company. Foremost Lithium’s public offering was set for pricing on Monday night (Aug. 7, 2023), but the deal did not get done. The deal will return to the calendar after a new pricing date is set.
The rest of this week’s calendar includes LQR House (LQR proposed), a Miami Beach-based digital marketing company for alcohol brands; Vitro Biopharma (VTRO proposed), a Denver-based biotech focused on stem cell therapy for an orphan disease, and Solowin Holdings (SWIN proposed), the Cayman Islands-incorporated parent of a Hong Kong-based financial services firm that caters to Chinese investors.
Bankers now expect this week’s IPOs to raise $40.0 million. That volume figure alone confirms that the IPO market’s traditional August slowdown is here. After the calendar flipped to August last week, only four IPOs started trading. Those four tiny IPOs raised a total of $37.7 million.
Stay tuned.