Vkusville will hold an IPO. This will be the grocery retailer's first listing since 2014.

The Vkusvill retail chain intends to enter the Moscow Exchange in the next three years, learned Kommersant . This could be the grocery retailer's first IPO since 2014.

More. Now Vkusvill is negotiating with potential investors on the placement of its shares on the Moscow Exchange, sources in investment circles told the publication and confirmed by a source close to the retailer. The press service of Vkusvill did not respond to the publication's request. The discussion is at an early stage, so the details of the IPO are not yet known, and the underwriters have not yet been selected.

• One of the possible options for entering the exchange , which the retailer is considering, involves the placement on the Moscow Exchange of up to 25% of the increased authorized capital.
• To accommodate the network, it will be necessary to increase the number of stores by 30%, says a source close to the retailer. Now, 720 outlets operate under the Vkusvill brand, mainly in Moscow and the Moscow region, in other regions the development of the network has just begun, says Mikhail Burmistrov, general director of Infoline-Analytics.
• The placement will allow Vkusvill to receive a high business valuation and in the future sell the company to a large federal network, said Marat Ibragimov, senior analyst at Gazprombank. Burmistrov, based on data for 2018, estimates the company's value at about 15 billion rubles. According to him, when placed, it can grow to 40 billion rubles by mid-2020.
• The realistic timeframe for the retailer to go public is 2020-2021, says a source close to the retailer. A representative of one of the investment funds notes that the Vkusvill business is not on the scale to carry out the placement of shares. The timing will depend on how successfully the network will be able to enter the market of St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod, then investors will be able to assess its expansion potential at the federal level, Burmistrov notes.

Context. Now the owners of the retailer, which positions itself as a food chain, are the Baring Vostok funds (12.16%), the founder of the network Andrey Krivenko (1.76%) and Evgeny Lisitsyn (owns 86.08% through the Izbenka Project and company "Evolutionary goal"), follows from the data of the Unified State Register of Legal Entities. Baring Vostok is unlikely to leave the board of Vkusvill, since the standard investment horizon for funds is 10 years, Ibragimov believes.

To learn more. You can read about what business principles the founder of the network Andrey Krivenko follows here . An excerpt from the book of the external communications manager of the Vkusvill and Izbenka companies, Evgeny Shchetin, VkusVill: How to make a revolution in retail, doing everything wrong, can be read here .

Liana Faizova