Romanian tech firm eyes London stock market listing

london stock exchange
Credit: Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg

Bitdefender, Romania’s biggest technology company, is planning to sell a stake before an initial public offering that could take place on the London Stock Exchange.

The business was originally part of Softwin, a company founded by chief executive Florin Talpes and his wife Mariuca in Bucharest in 1989, the year of Romania’s anti-communist revolution, when he worked as a researcher in a computer science institute.

Mr Talpes developed anti-virus software to protect against threats coming from Bulgaria, a common source of viruses in the 1990s. He spun off the operation from Softwin in 2007 and Bitdefender now claims to have a presence in more than 100 countries.

The company’s rivals include Norton, owned by American company Symantec, McAfee, part of Intel, Kaspersky of Russia, Trend Micro and Sophos.

It claims to have its technologies installed on more than 500m devices in homes and offices across the world. Bitdefender had revenues of $74.7m in 2014 and the company is now wholly owned by Mr Talpes.

“Bitdefender’s strategy is to go public in the near future,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “Therefore in 2017 we plan to attract a minority investor in the company. We haven’t made a decision regarding which stock exchange we will go with, and the London Stock Exchange is not excluded.”

Last week financial software supplier Misys postponed its stock market return, blaming “market conditions”.Budget gyms operator Pure Gym also delayed flotation plans recently.

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