IPO Hold···

DataStreams will be delaying its IPO, which it was initially aiming to carry out this year. The company will instead focus its efforts on attracting investment and strengthening its global competitiveness.

CEO Lee Young-Sang held a shareholders' meeting at the Novotel Ambassador Hotel in Gangnam, Seoul on the 2nd of June and announced that the decision had been made due to a frozen IPO market and the issue of undervaluation. The outlook was positive at the start of the year, however, the IPO market has more recently started to run cold. This is most likely down to the worsening destabilization of the global stock market caused by interest rate hikes and the ongoing Ukraine crisis. Market conditions in the second half of the year are equally uncertain.

A DataStreams spokesman elaborated, "We have decided that it would not be wise to go ahead with the IPO listing.  In the current market, advanced technology companies like DataStreams are not being undervalued and poorly evaluated."

DataStreams recently unveiled a new slogan 'Good to Great'.The idea behind it is that the company will progress to becoming a major global player having dominated the domestic technology market for more than 20 years. It aims to transform itself into a leading global company in big data fabrics by gradually expanding sales and increasing profit margins.

The company will also gradually strengthen existing technologies through product redesign and quality innovation. It will further its advances into international markets by expanding on a global scale and establishing PaaS models. Additionally, DataStreams plans to continue breaking into data fabric-based business domains such as mashup services and data sales businesses.

Lee Young-sang further explained the reasoning behind the postponement of the IPO, saying, "We had prepared everything we needed to list this year, but in light of the current market situation, I decided it more important to be properly recognized on a global scale than to proceed with IPO where there could be valuation concerns. The current global trend shows that cloud infrastructure companies are highly valued, followed by big data platform companies. The situation in Korea is similar. Datastreams is currently the only Korean company that can compete with global data companies entering the domestic market. We have, therefore, chosen to further enhance our ability to compete by honing in on our strengths."