Auckland-based company plans to list on NZX, ASX

Travel booking software company Serko plans to list on the NZ and Australian stock exchanges this year. Photo / NZ Herald

Auckland-based software company Serko, which specialises in corporate travel booking, said it plans to list on the New Zealand and Australian stock exchanges before September this year.

Serko's flagship, Serko On-line, is a cloud-based corporate travel booking engine that is the biggest in Asia-Pacific by market share and, together with Serko's international partners, the second biggest in the world, the company said in a statement.

The company said it deals with A$5 billion in travel spending across the Asia Pacific region each year and is now looking at its next growth phase.

In 1998, Gullivers Pacific invested in Serko and in late 2004, with the float of Gullivers on the NZX, Serko became a wholly-owned subsidiary.

Gullivers was later taken over by Queensland's S8, which itself was bought out by the funds management company, MFS, in 2006.

Serko is now independently owned by the original founders - Darrin Grafton and Bob Shaw - and a group of private equity partners.

In 2004, the DeLoitte's Fast 500 growth survey ranked Serko as eighth fastest growing company in New Zealand. The same year, Serko was ranked as the the top Travel Industry Firm in Deloitte's "Unlimited Fast 50".

More than 60 per cent of all corporate travel agencies in New Zealand book through Serko systems, the company said.