Saga raises £550m after floating at the bottom of indicative range

Saga, a provider of insurance and holidays to Britain's over- 50s, raised £550 million after selling shares at the bottom of the range used to canvass investors.

The shares were sold at 185 pence apiece, giving Saga a market value of £2.1 billion, the company said in a statement today. It initially sought as much as 245 pence.

The shares erased early gains of as much as 2.2 per cent to finish unchanged on their first day of trading.

Saga’s pricing comes amid waning appetite for initial public offerings in the UK following the underperformance of several private-equity-backed companies in the past 12 months.

"Even at the bottom of the range, I didn't like" the pricing, said George Luckraft, a fund manager at Axa Framlington in London, which manages about $76.3 billion. – (Bloomberg)