POLED and MakinaLax become the focus of attention in the IPO market

In the first week of May’s IPO market, Porred launched a new stock subscription targeting retail investors, while MACHINALAX continued demand forecasting for institutional investors, with market attention focused on these two companies.

According to industry news, baby product manufacturing and sales company Porred will conduct general subscriptions on the 4th and 6th. Founded in 2019, this company mainly produces car safety seats and related accessories, achieving sales of 52.81B KRW and operating profit of 6.2 billion KRW in 2024. In its first year, sales were about 7.2 billion KRW, increasing to approximately 80 billion KRW last year, which is seen as a sign of its growth potential. Porred is advancing toward listing on KOSDAQ, with institutional demand forecasts conducted from April 22 to 28, and the final public offering price set at the upper limit of the desired range (4,100 KRW to 5,000 KRW), at 5,000 KRW.

Demand forecasting is a process before listing where institutional investors assess whether the proposed public offering price is reasonable. Porred’s setting of the public offering price at the upper end of the range can be interpreted as confirming a certain level of investor demand above a baseline. General subscriptions are usually the stage where individual investors apply for public shares, thus serving as another indicator of subscription enthusiasm. Porred aims to list on KOSDAQ on the 14th, with NH Investment & Securities as the lead underwriter.

Meanwhile, industrial-specific AI developer MACHINALAX will continue its demand forecast from April 28 to May 6. The desired public offering price range is set at 12,500 KRW to 15,000 KRW per share. Founded in 2017, MACHINALAX had a consolidated baseline sales of 8.3 billion KRW last year, with an operating loss of 10.9 billion KRW. It is clear that the company is still in the stage of technological investment and business expansion rather than profitability. In August last year, the company was selected as the executing enterprise for the defense AI weapon system MLSecOps construction project promoted by the Defense Science Research Institute. Its self-developed AI platform “Runway” was included in the 2024 AI analysis firm CB Insights’ machine learning operations market map, alongside Scale AI, Hugging Face, and others, as the only Korean company listed in the AI development platform field.

Recently, the new stock market has shown a trend where stable-performing consumer companies and technology firms with future growth potential are jointly subject to investment evaluation. Porred leverages its performance and scale growth, while MACHINALAX benefits from the expansion and technological competitiveness of the AI industry. MACHINALAX plans to conduct general subscriptions on the 11th and 12th, with a listing scheduled for the 20th. This trend suggests that in the future IPO market, there may be a more pronounced tendency to selectively invest in profit-validated companies and technology-oriented firms.