Egypt’s Juhayna Food Industries closed its private offering of 164.8 million shares on 7 June.

The offering, which was 1.75 times oversubscribed, is part of a plan to raise about £E1bn ($176.5m) to finance future expansion projects.

Juhayna’s shares were sold at $0.86 each in the private placement, with most of the demand coming from Western funds, with strong interest also being shown by Gulf Arab and Egyptian investors, according to investment bank EFG-Hermes, which served as financial adviser for the offering.

The private placement involves 80 per cent of 206 million new shares (164.8 million shares). The remaining 20 per cent (41.20 million shares) will be sold to the public as an initial public offering, the first in Egypt since May 2008.

The public subscription, which also began on 6 June will close on 10 June, with results to be announced to the Egyptian Exchange on 14 June.

Retail investors can subscribe to the IPO at a price of $0.82 per share, representing a 5 per cent discount from the private placement price of $0.86.

The total offering represents 39.6 per cent of the company’s capital. Juhayna had initially set an upper limit of $0.99 per share in the offering, which would have enabled it to raise $204m.

“The capital increase is to allow us to enter new investments in dairy production and to plug the current gap between the size of our production and our land reclamation projects,” says Juhayna’s chief executive officer Safwan Thabet.