STOCK TO WATCH: A pizza…and £1,000 of Deliveroo shares

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STOCK TO WATCH: A pizza…and £1,000 of Deliveroo shares in your London float, please

By Alex Lawson For The Mail On Sunday

Published: | Updated:

An appetising offer has arrived from Deliveroo. It’s not a halfpriced Biryani, but a plan to offer £50million of shares to customers.

They can register their interest in up to £1,000 of stock via the takeaway firm’s app tomorrow, when it is expected to formally unveil its £7.5 billion London float. If the offer is oversubscribed, the most loyal customers will be prioritised.

The offering is heartening as armchair investors have been locked out of several big floats of late, angering the major investment platforms.

Customers can register their interest in up to £1,000 of stock via the takeaway firm’s app

Deliveroo also aims to give £16million of payments to the riders who have delivered the most orders, with an average windfall of £440, via a ‘Thank You Fund’.

Given the questions it has faced over riders’ rights, we’ll reserve judgment on how generous this gratitude is until it’s clear how much management will make from this whopper of a flotation.

Premier Foods 

If Deliveroo isn’t to your taste, check out home cooking specialist Premier Foods. Tomorrow it will launch a £1million marketing blitz for its Sharwood’s curry sauce brand – its first in five years.

Shares in the maker of Oxo and Bisto have made big gains over the past year as consumers munch their way through lockdown at home. They sit at 93p, up from early pandemic lows of 19p, but will doughty Premier’s brands be shunned when restaurants reopen?

Amigo Holdings 

Savvy hedge fund Bybrook Capital has quietly been building up a sizeable stake in Amigo Holdings, the guarantor lender that has had a shocker since floating in 2018 at £2.75 a share.

Bybrook, a debt-focused fund, recently said it owned 6.5 per cent of Amigo while US heavyweight JP Morgan bought a similar amount of stock.

The shares, though, endured a tough ride last week, sliding to just 13p as Amigo was outed as the most complained-about lender in the UK. There are fears that compensation claims could push the firm towards insolvency.

It looks like Amigo badly needs a friend.

Telit Communications 

Activist investor DBAY Advisors has raised its stake in Telit Communications, and now owns 26 per cent of the AIM-listed ‘internet of things’ provider.

Quite what that will mean for Telit – which hit the headlines in 2017 when its chief executive Oozi Cats had to resign after it emerged he was linked to fraud in the US – remains to be seen.

Late last year, Telit received three takeover bids, including one from DBAY.

The other offers came from one of Telit’s rivals, US-listed Lantronix, and Swiss semiconductor firm U-blox.

However, the Telit board failed to agree a deal with any of the potential buyers.

Now that DBAY holds a sizeable chunk of the company, it looks well positioned to have another tilt. 

Contributor:Ben Harrington

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