Arria NLG PLC (LON:NLG) Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Stuart Rogers caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss their proposed listing on the New Zealand and Australia stock exchange, what this means for investors in London and how the proceeds of the fundraiser will be used
Q1: Now Stuart, you’re changing your listing from the UK’s AIM market to list on the New Zealand and Australia, why have you chosen to move to this geography specifically and what’s the main reason for the move?
A1: Well, let’s talk about New Zealand and Australia first, in essence it’s not really a move, Arria NLG are expanding the number of markets that the stock will be listed on so we’ll talk about what we’ll do with the UK market in a moment. With New Zealand and Australia, that’s really where we started, a lot of our earlier investors, a lot of our founders were in New Zealand so there was a lot of focus there initially, being a UK company we listed first on the AIM exchange in the UK but we always had a focus on New Zealand and with a focus on New Zealand you’re going to naturally have a focus on Australia. We have a very broad shareholder base that includes UK shareholders, US shareholders, shareholders in New Zealand and Australia and as you look at the expansion of a global company like ours and you look at meeting the needs of your global shareholder base in terms of their ease of access to the market, we always had a desire to expand beyond our initial market so we had chosen New Zealand and Australia because it addresses the large shareholder base we have out there giving them a little more ease of access to the market. Further, it should improve liquidity of the stock over time, it’s a 24 hour trading world and it’s not unusual to maintain multiple listings in multiple jurisdictions, the UK tends to be somewhat of an institutional focussed market. New Zealand and Australia are a little more mixture of institutional and retail, in New Zealand, a little more focussed on early-stage software companies, IT tech companies, and that fits our profile so you really need to think of this as an expansion to multiple market jurisdictions and just a plan to better meet the global needs, access to a stock by our growing shareholder base.
Q2: As you’ve said, you’re keeping your main market listing in the UK, what does this mean for investors in London?
A2: We’re shifting from a listing on the AIM market to a standard listing on the London Stock Exchange and that’s really being done for procedural, administrative purposes. At the end of the day, the way a UK shareholder or UK investor or potential investor should look at it is nothing is changing, they have the access to the stock the way they have access to the stock now. It’s just when we’re all done with this, in particular change in the way we trade, we’re going to have access for people in the UK, in New Zealand and in Australia which we think is a good kind of global coverage for us right now.
Q3: So from the fundraise, what do you anticipate the proceeds to be used for?
A3: Arria NLG a growing company, we’re looking to expand our client base, as our client base expands that requires us to continue to build up the development resources of the company, we also have a lot of focus on financial services, a growing focus on the financial services sector. In the financial services sector there’s a lot of potential clients and demand for NLG technologies in the United States so from a sales, marketing and support standpoint for meeting the needs of that particular channel for us, or segment for us, we’ll be looking to expand our resources in the United States. We are also, as we’ve announced, looking beyond the core platform business that we have engaged in for many years, and as we’ve talked about to the market previously, expanding our NLG technology to a couple of other directions, one for software as a service (SaaS) offering, we’re looking to bring out the product later this year that’ll focus on providing analytical capabilities for people who have access to third party accounting packages, a product called Recount and also the expansion of our business into serving developers in large organisations through an NLG developer’s toolkit. So all of those things require capital so the focus on the capital is going to be in many ways on expanding Arria NLG in a couple of different directions.
