argenx

Lead Manager

Kempen is pleased to announce that it acted as Lead Manager to argenx in its USD 484 million global offering

Transaction highlights

Global Accelerated Bookbuild Offering raising USD 484m by placing 4,000,000 common shares and ADSs at a price of USD 121.00 (€109.18) each with gross proceeds potentially increasing to USD 557 million in case the over-allotment option is exercised in full
The deal was tightly priced with a discount of only 4.1% to the last closing price
European investor Baillie Gifford acted as cornerstone investor, having indicated pre-launch interest to invest up to $220 million in the company. Mid 2018, Kempen was the first to bring the argenx investment case on their radar and flew argenx’ CEO and CSO in February 2019 to Edinburgh for the initial conversation
Kempen has supported argenx throughout its public life via roadshows, its annual Life Sciences & Healthcare conferences and other stages. In spite of the orderbook only being open late evening hours European time, Kempen was able to secure demand from high quality European and US investors
Kempen acted as Joint Global Coordinator and Joint Bookrunner in argenx’ IPO on Euronext in 2014, advised the company on its Nasdaq IPO in May 2017 and subsequent US public offering in December 2017 and stepped into a Co-Manager role in argenx’ next US public offering in September 2018. Furthermore, Kempen has been the number one broker in the stock ever since argenx’ 2014 IPO, trading over €1.8bn of its stock to date
This marks the 7th US Life Sciences & Healthcare ECM transaction in 2019 in which Kempen acted as an underwriter, the second just this week and the very first in which it acted as Lead Manager

Company description

argenx is a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing a deep pipeline of differentiated antibody-based therapies for the treatment of severe auto-immune diseases and cancer. The company is focused on developing product candidates with the potential to be either first-in-class against novel targets or best-in-class against known, but complex, targets in order to treat diseases with a significant unmet medical need. argenx’ ability to execute on this focus is enabled by its suite of differentiated technologies. The SIMPLE AntibodyTM Platform, based on the powerful llama immune system, allows argenx to exploit novel and complex targets, and its three complementary Fc engineering technologies are designed to expand the therapeutic index of its product candidates.

Background Kempen Life Sciences & Healthcare

In 2019, Kempen successfully completed a large number of transactions in its Life Sciences & Healthcare franchise, including: Co-Manager in the USD 68.9 million capital increase by Merus, Co-Manager in the USD 57.5 million capital increase by ProQR, Co-Manager in the USD 150 million Nasdaq Initial Public Offering of BioNTech, Sole Bookrunner in the €9.0 million capital increase by MDxHealth, Co-Manager in the USD 20 million global offering of Celyad, Co-Manager in the USD 582 million Nasdaq Initial Public Offering of Genmab, Joint Bookrunner in the €116 million secondary sale of Fagron shares by Waterland and Baltisse, Joint Bookrunner in the €48.7 million rights issue by Transgene, Joint Bookrunner in the SEK 727 million capital increase by Oncopeptides, Co-Manager in the USD 84 million Nasdaq Initial Public Offering of HOOKIPA Pharma, Sole Block Placing Agent of c. USD 130 million argenx shares, Joint Global Coordinator and Joint Bookrunner in the €27.5 million Initial Public Offering of Sequana Medical, Joint Bookrunner in the NOK 222 million capital increase by Nordic Nanovector, Joint Bookrunner in the €55.5 million capital increase by Biocartis, Sole Financial Adviser in the sale of Medsen Pharmacies and compounding pharmacy Ceban.