Qatari data center developer Meeza is to float on the Qatar Stock Exchange.

The company plans to IPO in July, with half of its issued shares available in the offering.

The IPO will see 324,490,000 ordinary shares offered at QAR2.17, valuing the float at around $192 million.

Qinvest said seven institutional investors have subscribed to 37.41 percent of the Offer Shares, led by Qatar’s Sovereign Wealth Fund – Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the civil and military pension funds which are managed by the General Retirement and Social Insurance Authority (GRSIA), and the General Authority for Minors Affairs (GAMA).

Meeza was founded in 2008 as the IT services provider for the state-led Qatar Foundation, in partnership with Ooredoo. The Foundation and Ooredoo own 80 and 20 percent of Meeza respectively; this will reduce to 40 and 10 percent after the IPO.

Meeza offers a number of data center colocation, cloud, and managed IT & security services. The company launched its fifth data center – M-Vault 5 – in October 2022. The site is leased to Microsoft for its Qatari Azure cloud region.

The company’s five facilities currently offer a total of 24.4MW, which it claims represents a 50 percent market share in Qatar – local rivals include Meeza stakeholder Ooredoo and Mannai ICT. The company aims to expand its capacity by 19.5MW over the next two to three years.

The five facilities are currently averaging 81.8 percent utilized, though most are in the 90s and brought down by the recently-opened MV-5 (18 percent utilized). In total, the company had 2,549 racks and 13.5MW utilized by customers at the end of 2022.

The company said a sixth facility, MV-6, is being considered next to the recently-expanded MV-2.

Local telco reportedly Ooredoo operatives five of its own data centers totaling around 60,000 square feet (5,575 sqm) and 22MW. Mannai ICT operates a single 2MW facility.

According to the IPO prospectus, Meeza saw revenues of QAR 352.9 million in 2022 ($96.9m, up 7.4 percent on 2021), net profit of QAR 52m ($14.2m, up 18.4 percent), and EBITDA of QAR 123m ($33.7m, up 18 percent). Data center services represented QAR 138.2 million ($37.9m) in revenue in 2022, up 10.1 percent on 2021.

The company had QAR 203.4 million ($55.8m) in cash and equivalents on hand at the end of 2022. Total debt stood at QAR 148.4m ($40.7m).