Elice Falls 32% in Kosdaq Debut Despite 400x Retail Rush

Shares in Elice fell as much as 32% to 61,400 won in Tuesday's Kosdaq debut, after the Seoul-based company priced its IPO at 90,500 won, the top of its marketed range, to raise 201 billion won ($151 million), Bloomberg reported. The deal was the Kosdaq's biggest listing of the year and valued the self-described "neocloud service provider" above 1 trillion won.

The retail book had told a different story. The portion open to individual investors was oversubscribed more than 400 times, with roughly 10.3 trillion won of subscription deposits chasing the shares, according to The Japan Times.

Elice said it would spend much of the proceeds on portable modular data centers in South Korea, with planned expansion into the United States, Japan and Singapore.

The problem: sentiment toward the sector had already cooled. "High borrowing costs, heavy capital requirements and uncertainty over when spending on computing capacity will translate into profits have weighed on investor appetite for data centre businesses," the Bloomberg report noted, adding that multiple would-be issuers had already delayed their listing plans. It lands into the run of neocloud and hyperscaler stories moving through our AI infrastructure feed this month.