FPC Adds to Working Capital With Bond Issuance

Amid a strategic corporate transformation, Fingerprint Cards has added fuel to its business through a SEK 300 million issuance of senior secured bonds. The company says that it will use proceeds from the bond issuance to fund general business activities including research and development efforts aimed at fueling growth.

Getting into technical details, FPC explained in a statement that it had issued “senior secured bonds with a three-year tenor and a floating interest rate of Stibor 3 months + 9.0% per annum under a framework of SEK 500 million”. The company said that the offering “was well received by both Nordic and European institutional investors,” and that it will apply to have the bonds listed on the Nasdaq Stockholm exchange.

The move comes soon after the conclusion of a strategic review launched by Fingerprints’ board of directors. The review determined that FPC will effectively be split into two subsidiaries, with one (called “Fingerprint Technology Company”) to focus on mobile biometrics, and the other (“Fingerprint Cards Switzerland”) to maintain the company’s payments and access control activities. The former will be based in Shanghai and the latter in Zug, Switzerland.

According to Fingerprint Cards CEO Christian Fredrikson, both entities are already seeing increasing demand, and the company is looking to build on that momentum.

“Fingerprints has ambitious growth plans, which increases the need for working capital and investments in R&D,” he explained. “I am therefore very pleased that we have now secured funding to further accelerate Fingerprints’ growth.”

Fingerprint Cards delivered one recent sign of that growth just a couple of weeks ago with its announcement of a partnership with the UK’s Freevolt Technology. Freevolt is using FPC’s T-Shape fingerprint sensor module in a new access card dubbed the “S-Key”.

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December 17, 2021 – by Alex Perala