Spotify considers directly selling its shares to the retail public with no underwriter involvement.

Rose Prince

2018-01-08 10:37:00 Mon ET

Spotify considers directly selling its shares to the retail public with no underwriter involvement. The music-streaming company plans a direct list on NYSE in lieu of a hot IPO. This alternative procedure can be cheaper, faster, and less legally risky to the issuer. The issuer may then lose its first-day price run-up in a hot IPO, which seldom benefits anyone apart from the institutional investors who receive an initial allocation of shares. In contrast, most startups file for an IPO through investment banks. These underwriters round up institutional investors to buy the issuer's fresh shares in order to establish a fair market price. Through a promotional roadshow, the underwriters commit to covering these new shares in their due diligence and fair valuation. The underwriters receive a considerable bounty in the order of 3%-5% of the IPO price (e.g. $300 million fee-payment to Alibaba's underwriters).

As cash-rich companies such as Spotify, Uber, and Airbnb have little incentive to raise capital via IPOs, these cash cows prefer to directly list on stock exchanges. Spotify can thus bypass firm commitment on the part of IPO-fee-driven investment banks. Nevertheless, the direct list may expose Spotify to bear raid by short-sellers, little underwriter liability, and less blue-sky transparency. This direct list option may attract more unicorns into the U.S. public stock market.

 


If any of our AYA Analytica financial health memos (FHM), blog posts, ebooks, newsletters, and notifications etc, or any other form of online content curation, involves potential copyright concerns, please feel free to contact us at service@ayafintech.network so that we can remove relevant content in response to any such request within a reasonable time frame.

Blog+More

Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld suggest that relatively successful ethnic groups exhibit common cultural traits in America.

Laura Hermes

2023-05-21 12:26:00 Sunday ET

Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld suggest that relatively successful ethnic groups exhibit common cultural traits in America.

Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld suggest that relatively successful ethnic groups exhibit common cultural traits in America. Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld (2015)

+See More

Amazon and Google face more intense antitrust scrutiny.

Apple Boston

2019-06-21 13:33:00 Friday ET

Amazon and Google face more intense antitrust scrutiny.

Amazon and Google face more intense antitrust scrutiny. In recent times, Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission have reached an internal agreement

+See More

Stock Synopsis: Pharmaceutical post-pandemic patent development cycle

John Fourier

2024-05-05 10:31:00 Sunday ET

Stock Synopsis: Pharmaceutical post-pandemic patent development cycle

Stock Synopsis: Pharmaceutical post-pandemic patent development cycle In terms of stock market valuation, the major pharmaceutical sector remains at its

+See More

Timothy Geithner shares his reflections on the post-crisis macro financial stress tests for U.S. banks.

Fiona Sydney

2023-04-07 12:29:00 Friday ET

Timothy Geithner shares his reflections on the post-crisis macro financial stress tests for U.S. banks.

Timothy Geithner shares his reflections on the post-crisis macro financial stress tests for U.S. banks. Timothy Geithner (2014)   Macrofinanci

+See More

To secure better E.U. economic arrangements, Jeremy Corbyn encourages Labour legislators to back a second referendum on Brexit.

Olivia London

2019-06-17 11:25:00 Monday ET

To secure better E.U. economic arrangements, Jeremy Corbyn encourages Labour legislators to back a second referendum on Brexit.

To secure better economic arrangements with European Union, Jeremy Corbyn encourages Labour legislators to back a second referendum on Brexit. In recent tim

+See More

Tony Robbins explains in his latest book on personal finance that *patience* is the top secret.

Becky Berkman

2017-01-27 17:19:00 Friday ET

Tony Robbins explains in his latest book on personal finance that *patience* is the top secret.

Tony Robbins explains in his latest book on personal finance that *patience* is the top secret to successful stock investment. The stock market embeds an

+See More