Maxis puts Malaysia back on the map

Despite its large size and relatively steep price tag, an $804 million IPO for the country's largest cellular operator, Maxis Communications, has made a very convincing showing with both domestic and international investors. Until Maxis, it took extremely compelling valuations to draw international investors back to South East Asia's beleaguered IPO markets and in this instance, many outside observers thought that domestic investors were going to be the mainstay of the order book. However, a late surge of momentum two to three days before pricing on Saturday overturned everyone's expectations and in the end, the international book closed five times oversubscribed and the domestic institutional book just over four times.