About You shines on its stock market debut

The online fashion retailer About You hits the nerve of the times on the stock market. At the debut in Frankfurt, the shares went into trading on Wednesday at 25.60 euros and have since climbed to 26.80 euros. The issue price was 23 euros. Company boss Tarek Müller was pleased with the good start: "For us today is day one of the second chapter of our journey. We are looking ahead." There will be no big celebration at the Hamburg headquarters of the Otto subsidiary, even with a view to the Corona crisis: "But we have 90-minute time windows in which our employees gradually come by. That's what I'm looking forward to the most This is the first time in a year and a half that I have seen most of the employees in person. " The Frankfurt Stock Exchange is currently booming. This year, the Linux software provider Suse, the radio mast operator Vantage Towers and the online used car dealer Auto1 have collected billions from investors. The online bicycle dealer Bike24 and Cherry - a manufacturer of computer mice, switches and keyboards - want to follow suit this month. Only on Monday did the online optician Mister Spex make his plans public. The breakfast cereal supplier MyMuesli should also be in the starting blocks. About You was valued at around 3.9 billion euros at the allotment price. The big Berlin competitor Zalando, which made its stock market debut in 2014 and is now considered a DAX candidate, currently has around 24 billion euros. Müller doesn't like the comparison with Zalando. "We are now active in 23 countries. Zalando is not in many of them," he said in an earlier interview with Reuters. The biggest differentiator is About You's technology division, which sells infrastructure solutions for companies and is growing rapidly. In addition, About You, which now has more than 30 million customers and more than 1000 employees, is aimed at a younger target group. About You intends to put the majority of the proceeds from the IPO of more than 650 million euros into the growth and expansion of the technical infrastructure. "We are concentrating on southern and northern Europe for the time being. In addition, the map in continental Europe still has a few blank spots that we would like to cover," said Müller. In addition to the retail group Otto, the financial investor Heartland of the Danish entrepreneur Anders Holch Povlsen is also involved in the About You company, which was founded seven years ago. Povlsen owns the Bestseller company (Vero Moda, Jack & Jones, Vila) and has invested in Zalando and Asos as well as the Klarna payment service, among others. In the past fiscal year to the end of February, About You's revenues rose by 57 percent to 1.17 billion euros, cracking the billion in sales for the first time. In view of the high investments, however, the Hamburg-based company is in the red. Since it was a private placement, private investors can only get in now.