Kingdom Holding IPO 40% covered

The retail portion of Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Holding's $861 million initial public offering was 40% covered by the end of Saturday, the lead manager said on Sunday.

Kingdom Holding, owned by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, is selling 315 million existing shares, or a 5% stake, to Saudi nationals at 10.25 riyals each, valuing the company at $17.2 billion.

The IPO, which closes July 18, had raised 635.1 million riyals ($169.4 million) since opening on Tuesday, representing 40% coverage of the shares offered to retail investors, Samba Financial Group said. The number of subscribers to the end of Saturday reached 453,000, Samba said.

Half the shares of the IPO are reserved for institutional investors.

Prince Alwaleed's stake in Kingdom, which had $24 billion in assets at the end of 2006, will fall to 93.5% after the sale. His son and daughter are also shareholders in Kingdom.

A nephew of King Abdullah, Alwaleed has made billions of dollars investing in underperforming companies and is the world's 13th-richest person, according to Forbes magazine.

He is taking his company public after a stock market crash halved the value of the Saudi bourse last year and diminished the appetite for initial public offerings in the world's biggest oil-exporting region.

The Saudi stock index dropped 52.5% last year and is off about 6% in 2007, making it the worst performer among 13 Arab benchmarks tracked by Reuters.

Four of the 13 markets fell more than 35% last year, making more companies reluctant to sell shares to the public and investors more cautious about buying them.

Kingdom's IPO prices its shares at around 67 times 2006 earnings, more than five times the average for the Saudi bourse, on which it will be the fifth-largest stock.

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