Jan 19, 2023

01/19/2023 | 05:23am EST Message : *Required fields FRANKFURT (dpa-AFX) - For the investors of Aurelius , the stock market week is going very badly so far. With the announcement that the company intends to change its segment and have its shares listed only on the Regulated Unofficial Market instead of the Qualified Unofficial Market, the management caused considerable uncertainty on the market at the beginning of the week. On Thursday, the shares now attempted to stabilize, most recently rising 3.5 percent to 13.74 euros, after slumping by up to 40 percent since Monday. This was closer to the lowest level since 2012, which was marked in March 2020. Shareholders' rights from the shares would be preserved in the event of a segment change, the company said. But investors apparently weren't so sure. Analyst Marie-Therese Grübner of Hauck Aufhäuser Investment Banking wrote in a study the day before that such a move would mean significantly less transparency and disclosure requirements and could pave the way for a complete delisting. According to Aurelius, there is no longer a need for the company to use the financing options of the qualified over-the-counter market to raise equity. At the same time, the financial and regulatory burden of listing in this segment, which in some cases also leads to disadvantages in day-to-day business, has increased considerably in recent years, according to the company's further justification for the intended change of segment. According to expert Grübner, the first reason in particular points to a conceivable withdrawal from the stock exchange, especially since Aurelius has now clearly placed its focus on private market financing. For investors, a segment change would definitely be bad news. As soon as the shares were trading in the simple over-the-counter market, a complete delisting would also not result in a takeover bid and could simply be completed via the approval of the Supervisory Board and the Management Board, Grübner continued. The risk of delisting would make the share uninvestable for the majority of institutional investors. Grübner also considered management's plans to be surprising precisely because they could be seen as a complete reversal of previous attempts to reward shareholders more by means of share buybacks and dividends./ajx/tih/jha/ © dpa-AFX 2023