Sophos to float in UK's biggest-ever tech share offering

Anti-virus software vendor co-founded by Jan Hruska and Peter Lammer finally decides to go public

Security software company Sophos is to float on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) - 30 years after it was founded by Jan Hruska and Peter Lammer.

The public share offering will raise around $100 million for Sophos and value the company at as much as £1.5 billion or more. It follows news in December 2014 that the company had appointed advisors to help it run a stock market listing in 2015. Reports then indicated that it was also considering a New York flotation.

Sophos will debut on the LSE in July. "The importance of this cannot be over-emphasised. Assuming a valuation range of $1.5-$2.5b, this will be the biggest tech IPO [initial public offering] in the UK of all time. We've had very few in the last 15 years and most of those have been small," said TechMarketView analyst Richard Holway.

He continued: "Almost all of our largest SITS companies which were once on the LSE have since been acquired by global groups based outside the UK. The most recent being TeleCity but stretching all the way back to Hoskyns, CAP, Logica, SD-Scicon etcetera.

"IPOs create ecosystems. Where a company is headquartered and listed is usually where its top management resides and its principal R&D is undertaken. It is where its main accountants, legal advisers, investors/investment banks, PR people, and even analysts are located. In a Catch 22 situation, companies choose to IPO because of that ecosystem. So maybe Sophos will be the IPO that reverses the trend?"

However, it is not the first time that the company has announced an intention to float on the London Stock Exchange. In November 2007, the company issued a statement that it was to go public. That, however, was reversed and in May 2010, the company's owners sold a majority interest in the company to private equity company Apax Partners.

Apax paid some £580 million for its 70 per cent share stake, and it will no doubt be looking to make a big profit on the sale when Sophos is floated this summer.

Founded in 1985, the company initially focused on anti-virus software and encryption tools. In the late-1990s, it expanded internationally and today has offices across Europe, as well as the Middle East, India, Japan, Singapore and Australia. It also has threat-analysis centres in Abingdon in Oxfordshire, India, Hungary, Austria, Sydney and Vancouver.

It's Hungarian interests came via the acquisition of bust local security software company VirusBuster, whose developers and malware analysts all shifted over to Sophos. Its current CEO is Kris Hagerman, formerly the CEO at Corel.