Celoxica blames stock market conditions for IPO shortfall

An executive of Celoxica, an Oxford University spin-out that makes chip design software, blamed “depressive market” conditions for the company raising less capital than it initially expected, on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) of the London Stock Exchange.

The company said it raised £6.1 million from its initial public offering on 3 November, short of its indication of £10 million when the IPO was announced in September.

“The downturn is affecting companies across the board,” said Chris Sullivan, director of strategic alliances of Celoxica, in a telephone interview. “Unfortunately it’s the [stock] market that sets the value of companies.”

Still, regardless of the stock-market view, Sullivan said the company itself is optimistic about the growth of its market in semiconductor design in 2006. “That would work in our favour,” he said. He also said the company is glad to be listed on AIM as it foresees the advantage of being more visible to the public, which may translate to more confidence in the company from investors.

Celoxica shares traded at 35 pence the following day, up one penny from Thursday’s close and up from the IPO price of 31.25 pence a share.

The money was being raised forr product development, focusing on intellectual property of its software.

Investors in Celoxica include venture capital firms Advent, which is the largest shareholder with about 25 per cent of the company, Cazenove, Quester and industry investors Intel Capital, Xilinx, Wind River and Creative.

Celoxica sells software and electronic boards for designing and testing chips for equipment used in defence, consumer electronics, and cars. Its customers include Lockheed Martin, Toshiba, Canon, BAE Systems, and Fujitsu.

Its speciality, called Electronic System Level design, permits electronics engineers to design components more efficiently and quickly than previously possible. That’s important for increasingly complicated products that combine digital images, signal processing, multimedia and communications. According to a report by Gartner Group, a market-research firm, ESL will become a major driver of growth for the broader electronic-design automation market, and could be worth as much as $1.6 billion by 2009.