History (1995): Nomaï Offers Part of Shares on French Stock Market

Nomaï (Avranches, France) offered part of its stock to the public on the French stock market.

More precisely, 15,000 shares, 16.8% of the company’s capital, were put on the market last June 13 for a minimum price of 100 French Francs.

According to a Nomaï spokeswoman, interested buyers requested as many as 5.7 million shares – 37 times the number available. Only those willing to put up 135FF were actually able to get their hands on the shares and by the end of July the price had climbed to 194FF.

Following this debut on the stock market, the main shareholders remain Marc André Frouin and Marine Frouin, each with 37.5%. Other shareholders with a significant stake in the company now include: David Stewart (3.3%), president of Nomus, a fully-owned Nomaï subsidiary in Boca Raton, FL; Leon MaImed, VP WW marketing and sales at SunDisk; Jean-Louis Gassée, former VP of Apple Computer as well as founder and president of BE Inc.; Bernard Giroud, former president of Intel Europe and VP of Intel Corp.; and Jeffrey Kingston, a US lawyer specialized in industrial properties in the computer industry, who notably, was working on the Nintendo/Atari case.

Each of these last 4 now hold 0.8% of Nomaï.

The company has also just created a wholly-owned subsidiary in Singapore, under the direction of Greg Suetherland, to promote sales in Asia, an underdeveloped market for the French company.

Going public requires that a company reveal all of its inside information to interested investors. We also benefited from the opening of the company’s files, from which we pulled the following previously unpublished extracts.

The manufacturer of SyQuest compatible cartridges is anticipating a net income of $2.2 million this year, and a turnover of $2.8 million ($14.5 million in 1994).

About one third of this sum should come from sales of its new MCD drive, supposed to be launched in July. This product is expected to represent over 80% of company sales in 1996.

The contract signed with Xyratex, former IBM subsidiary in Havant, UK, to subcontract production of its MCD drives, states that Nomaï must buy a given number of units per year. Should the agreement in this clause be broken, the French firm must reimburse its supplier a sum equal to the manufacturing cost, up to $1.6 million.

In early 1995, for $580,000, Nomaï bought all of Myrica (Glenrothes, UK) a 15-person laboratory, directed by James Leslie, formerly working for Rodime, and with few other projects.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 91, published on August 1995.