IPO: Lessons from a Record Year

Three IPOs in one year! It had been a long time since that was seen at the Casablanca Stock Exchange. The last time the bell rang three times in the glass building on Avenue des FAR was in 2011, with the IPOs of Stroc Industrie, Jet Contractors, and S2M.

But where those IPOs were the last of a prosperous period, those of 2025, on the contrary, resonate as the beginning of a new era of stock market dynamism.

The year coming to an end indeed marks a real inflection point for the market, both in terms of the supply of fresh equity and the renewed appetite of demand for shares. The results of the three initial public offerings testify to this.

The IPO of Vicenne last July generated strong investor enthusiasm: the total amount subscribed reached 32.1 billion dirhams, while the company had only solicited the market for 500 million dirhams.

The operation was thus oversubscribed 65 times by 37,674 subscribers. A trend confirmed during the IPO of Cash Plus in November. With a total amount of 750 million dirhams, the operation was oversubscribed 64 times by more than 80,000 subscribers.

Finally, the IPO of SGTM was simply the most popular IPO in the history of the Casablanca listing.

The operation, amounting to 5,000 MDH, attracted no fewer than 173,000 subscribers, surpassing the previous benchmark, namely the 133,000 subscribers who had participated in the IPO of Maroc Telecom in 2004. The amount subscribed, for its part, exceeded 171 billion dirhams.

The Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Casablanca Stock Exchange, Brahim Benjelloun Touimi, speaking at the Cash Plus listing ceremony, sees in these results “a powerful signal of the maturity of the financial marketplace.”

According to this official, “each IPO is further proof that the Casablanca Stock Exchange is a strategic pillar of the Moroccan economy and an essential catalyst for mobilizing savings and financing the real economy.”

These remarkable figures also reflect a trend that only confirms itself with each operation: individuals and other small investors, who had gradually deserted the stock market during the 2010s, are back.

A recent report by the AMMC dedicated to investor profiles in the second quarter of 2025 revealed that Moroccan individuals accounted for 28% of the total transaction volume on the central market, a level not seen since 2017!

Furthermore, retail investors constituted the majority of subscribers in the last three IPOs, with a share exceeding 70%, thus forming the core of the free float. The figures also show that a new generation of investors is emerging.

Indeed, during the IPO of Cash Plus, 50% of individual subscribers are new, meaning they are investing in the stock market for the first time.

Shift in Mindset Among Executives

Far from being fleeting, this renewed attractiveness of the stock market is visibly here to stay, knowing that other IPOs and capital increases are waiting their turn.

“Other operations are coming. I think we can eventually reach a pace of one IPO per month,” estimates this professional. Such a pace would be close to the prosperous period of IPOs in the mid-2000s. Recall that between 2006 and 2008, 25 initial public offerings were completed.

The strong comeback of IPOs actually stems from a real change in mindset among company executives.

“When we talk about IPOs to executives, the listening is nothing like it was ten years ago. They are beginning to understand that the stock market is not an end, but a means. To raise money, to grow, to develop, to invest… It is really at that level that things are changing. Today, people come to us to ask if they can go public, what the right timing is, etc. It’s a dynamic we have never known,” emphasizes Younes Benjelloun, General Manager of CFG Bank, whose investment bank has orchestrated several IPOs in recent years.

Pushing his analysis further, he places the recent IPOs in a longer sequence, beginning in 2018, and marked by 11 initial public offering operations. Beyond the number of subscribers, these operations have a tangible impact on the national economy.

And that is the essential point. “The amount raised in capital increases during these operations is on the order of 5 billion dirhams out of the 6 billion raised in total. Some companies subsequently carried out capital increases of an additional 5 billion dirhams.

That’s a total of 10 billion dirhams in equity that have been injected into the stock market over a span of 7 years. These billions go to investment, to job creation,” argues Benjelloun, who refutes the common idea that the stock market “doesn’t serve much purpose,” that it is disconnected from the real economy.

“When Akdital opens 40 clinics, that’s 5,000 jobs. When TGCC changes scale, that’s thousands of jobs too,” he recalls.

For this official, an IPO is not just an opportunity to allow speculators to make capital gains with a short-term vision. “These operations above all allow a company to transition from a familial and cozy environment to a company that belongs to everyone.

This implies very strong pressure on the historical shareholders and management, so that this company is as profitable as possible, sustainable, and actively contributes to the country’s economy.”

And he concludes that the success of an IPO is verified over time: “The success of an IPO should not be measured by the number of subscribers, but by the behavior of the company and its share price after the operation. The true success is when the company grows and creates thousands of jobs.”