Shares in Japan’s Kioxia rose 10 per cent on its first day of trading in Tokyo, with private equity group Bain Capital’s listing of the lossmaking chipmaker finally getting off the ground after previous plans to float the company were aborted and a sale of the business collapsed.
Bain had acquired the former memory chip business of Toshiba in a landmark buyout six years ago. The Japanese conglomerate was in the depths of a financial crisis at the time and the deal was unprecedented in its scale for private equity in Asia, setting the stage for Japan to become the world’s second most active PE market after the US.
The initial public offering, the third largest this year in Japan after subway operator Tokyo Metro and X-ray device maker Rigaku, comes after previous efforts to list were called off in 2020 — knocked off course by the pandemic and rising trade frictions between the US and China over semiconductor technology.