Positive Technologies expects five-fold growth in number individual shareholders by end-2022

MOSCOW. April 6 (Interfax) - Positive Technologies , whose parent company is PJSC Positive Group and which develops information security solutions, expects to have 100,000 private individual shareholders by the end of this year, COO Maxim Pustovoi told Interfax.

"We expect the number of shareholders will increase to 100,000 by the end of this year, from 21,400 at the end of February," he said.

Pustovoi said 20,000 of the 21,400 were private individuals who bought shares after the company floated on the stock exchange. The share of such investors with one share is decreasing constantly.

"In our situation, when free float is limited to 10% of the shares transferred to employees before the company floated on the exchange, an increase in the number of shareholders is possible either through the sale of part of the shares by current minority shareholders [1,400 people] or through the sale of additional shares as part of an SPO," he said.

But Pustovoi did not talk about any plans for an SPO.

He did say that the good trend for the company's share price was prompting employees to sell their shares more actively.

The group changes its form of ownership from JSC to PJSC in December and registered a share prospectus with the Central Bank. The company's share capital comprises 60 million ordinary shares and 6 million preferred shares. Moreover, all preferred shares belong to one of the main shareholders. Evgeny Kireyev owns 8.81% of the ordinary shares, Dmitry Maximov owns 8.8%, Dmitry Maximov owns 47.08%, and Boris Simis owns 5.5%.

The free float was just over 10% of ordinary shares by the time shares started trading. They were gifted by existing shareholders to current and former employees and their partners - 1,400 people in all.

Net profit to International Financial Reporting Standards rose 26.5% in 2021 to 1.9 billion rubles. The board of directors has recommended that 950 million rubles of that be paid as dividends at 14.4 rubles per ordinary and preferred share.