ONLINE stock trading firm Diversified Financial Network Inc. or DFNN.com is set to launch its initial public offering within this month.

DFNN.com would be the first technology or the so-called "dot-com" company to do an IPO in the local bourse. The others managed to enter the capital market either through a backdoor listing or a shift in their business thrusts, like what Philweb.com and Ajo.net did.

In an interview, DFNN.com president and founder Ramon Garcia said his company was awaiting the green light from the Philippine Stock Exchange and the Securities and Exchange Commission to push through with the IPO.

He said the PSE listings committee had already approved the IPO and the final approval would likely be given within a month.

DFNN.com plans to list 58 to 60 million shares, of which 25 percent will be offered to the public. The target price would be between P10 and P20 per share.

"We're planning to list 25 percent of total equity. We're quite liberal in that sense," Garcia said.

DFNN will not be the first to list its shares at the PSE this year but it will be the first local company to do so. Sun Life Financial Services of Canada Inc. successfully debuted at the stock market last month, but this was simultaneous with the listing of the same amount of shares in three other stock exchanges around the world.

Garcia said he hoped that DFNN.com could provide a good example to other companies that were planning to list shares abroad instead of joining the local stock market, which has been the second worst performing stock market this year.

"A lot of overseas exchanges are trying to convince Filipino companies to list in their own exchanges. If they do, we'll lose a lot of IPOs to other exchanges," Garcia said.

But Garcia said he was confident that the PSE had enough mechanisms in place to encourage upstart companies to tap the local equities market.

"They allowed a company like mine to list. They put up a second board that allows companies with high growth potential to list even if they don't have track record. It's called the second board listing and that doesn't differentiate you from big companies like PLDT. You are listed in the same way that they are," Garcia said.

Asked whether he thought the timing for the IPO was right at this time that even in the US, appetite on tech stocks seemed to be declining, he said: "We are understood to be an Asian company with a Philippine base. We can be a leader in software, information technology development, and business-to-business or business-to-consumer market," he said.

Garcia said a company with good potentials could beat even the worst economic environment around it.

"The economy of Japan is in really bad shape but its stocks index is growing because of the tech stocks, the participation of IT companies, so I know we'll be the first but we won't be the last," Garcia said.

"We should groom the Philippines as a fantastic IT-centric country which we can market globally," he said.