ADT Caps hires IPO managers to speed up 2021 listing

ADT Caps Co., South Korea's No. 2 security services provider, has appointed Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and NH Investment & Securities Co. to manage its initial public offering planned for later this year, according to investment banking sources on Friday.

The SK Telecom Co. unit is valued at 3 trillion won ($2.7 trillion), on par with its bigger rival S-1 Corp.'s market capitalization. Back in 2018, the country's largest mobile carrier teamed up with Macquarie Korea Infrastructure Fund to acquire ADT for 2.97 trillion won.

SK Telecom is seeking to lift ADT's enterprise value to the 4 trillion won range in an IPO set to pave the way for financial investors' profitable exit. But the security services firm's domestic-focused business may render it to have limited growth potential, analysts said.

Its 2020 operating profit declined to 140.9 billion won from the previous year's 153.5 billion won, despite a 12% sales growth to 1.3 trillion won.

In comparison, S-1 Corp. posted 204.5 billion won in 2020 operating profit on sales of 2.2 trillion won. Samsung Group is the second-largest shareholder of S-1.

In March of this year, ADT Caps absorbed SK Infosec Co., a cybersecurity company, to expand its business beyond on-call physical security into the cloud infrastructure and digital realms. 

The IPO comes after SK Telecom in April announced the split-off of its operations into telecom and non-telecom units, a move aimed at bolstering valuations of its non-mobile operations.

Last year, SK Telecom kicked off the process to list the mobile app market operator One Store by selecting KB Securities, NH Investment & Securities and SK Securities Co. as the IPO underwriters, targeting to list in the second half of this year.

The mobile giant is also preparing the IPOs of the over-the-top platform Wavve, the navigation service app T Map Mobility Co. and the e-commerce firm 11Street.
 
Write to Ye-jin Jun at ace@hankyung.com
Yeonhee Kim edited this article.