Music streaming firm Deezer seeks to raise 300 million euros with IPO

PARIS: French music streaming service Deezer announced Thursday it aimed to raise at least 300 million euros ($345 million) via an initial public offering, as it bids to shore up its position in the ultra-competitive industry.
Deezer said it was issuing between six million and eight million new shares on the market.
The price will vary between 36.40 euros and 49.24 euros per share, but so will the number of shares issued, to ensure the total amount raised hits the target of 300 million euros ($345 million).
After the operation, the company as a whole would be worth between 900 million and 1.1 billion euros, said Deezer operations director Simon Baldeyrou.
Rival Spotify is valued at more than $8 billion.
Announcing the firm´s intention to sell shares to the public, chief executive Hans-Holger Albrecht said Tuesday the music-streaming market "is growing faster now and is set to become the main means of music distribution."
"The introduction in the stock market will enable us to accelerate our growth and continue to play a major role in the vanguard of the musical revolution which streaming offers," he said in a statement.
The offer´s subscription period was launched on Thursday and will close on October 26 for the French public and on October 27 for international investors.
Trading will start on the Paris stock exchange with the ticker "DZR" on October 30, Deezer said. Founded in 2007, the company raised its last private funding of 100 million euros from Russian-American billionaire Len Blavatnik in 2012.
With 6.3 million subscribers and 16 million individual users each month, Deezer is aiming to speed up its development, especially internationally, where the competition is fierce.Its main rival, Sweden´s Spotify, claims 75 million users, of whom 20 million subscribe to its paying version.
Last month Baldeyron told AFP the IPO move would give Deezer access to "a more diversified and more international base".
"It will also give the company greater visibility," he said, adding that the French start-up would be "the first of its sector" to test the appetite of market investors for music streaming.
Competitive heat is also being felt from US giant Apple which launched its music-streaming service on June 30.
The race for a share of the music streaming business has been fuelled by consumers abandoning CDs.
Revenue from full-length CDs, which long dominated the industry, fell by 31.5 percent in the first half of 2015 in the United States, the world´s largest market.