Riyadh – Mubasher: The stock of Saudi Arabia's BinDawood Holding surged at Wednesday’s opening in its first trading session on the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) to top winning stocks.

By 10:30 a.m. Riyadh time, the grocery giant’s stock jumped by 10% to SAR 105.60. Around 16,000 shares were traded via 807 transactions at SAR 1.680 million.

BinDawood started trading its shares on the Saudi bourse on Wednesday, with a 10% daily price fluctuation limit per share.

On 7 October, BinDawood announced pricing its initial public offering (IPO) at SAR 96 ($25.59) per share. The book-building process generated an order book of SAR 106.9 billion ($28.50 billion).

CEO at BinDawood, Ahmad BinDawood, told CNBC’s “Capital Connection” that the current environment is definitely a good time for the company to go public despite the ongoing virus situation.

“During the pandemic, the sector showed its resilience. We are lucky that we are in the (fast-moving consumer goods) grocery retail, where we saw very high demand coming from the customer side,” BinDawood continued.

BinDawood Holding owns the BinDawood and Danube retail chains and manages 73 hypermarkets and supermarkets in major Saudi cities, including Makkah, Medina, Jeddah, Riyadh, and Dammam. It plans to open an average of six stores a year to reach 100 outlets by 2024.

The sale of 22.86 million shares in BinDawood's IPO raised around $585 million.