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

Citron Research short-sellers initiate a class-action lawsuit against Tesla and its executive chairman Elon Musk.

Monica McNeil

2018-09-05 08:34:00 Wednesday ET

Citron Research short-sellers initiate a class-action lawsuit against Tesla and its executive chairman Elon Musk.

Citron Research short-sellers initiate a class-action lawsuit against Tesla and its executive chairman Elon Musk because he might have deliberately orchestr

+See More

Scientific research trumps basic intuition and common sense.

Amy Hamilton

2019-08-30 11:35:00 Friday ET

Scientific research trumps basic intuition and common sense.

The conventional wisdom suggests that chameleons change their skin coloration to camouflage their presence for survival through Darwinian biological evoluti

+See More

Warren Buffett points out that many people misunderstand his stock investment method in several ways.

Jonah Whanau

2017-06-21 05:36:00 Wednesday ET

Warren Buffett points out that many people misunderstand his stock investment method in several ways.

In his latest Berkshire Hathaway annual letter to shareholders, Warren Buffett points out that many people misunderstand his stock investment method in seve

+See More

Ben Horowitz shares many hard truths, setbacks, failures, obstacles, difficulties, and disappointments through his rare unique entrepreneurial journey at LoudCloud.

Laura Hermes

2025-05-29 08:25:28 Thursday ET

Ben Horowitz shares many hard truths, setbacks, failures, obstacles, difficulties, and disappointments through his rare unique entrepreneurial journey at LoudCloud.

Serial venture capitalist Ben Horowitz describes many hard truths, lessons, and insights from his entrepreneurial journey of running LoudCloud from a Silico

+See More

Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms most stock market indices from 2017 to 2022.

Peter Prince

2022-02-02 10:33:00 Wednesday ET

Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms most stock market indices from 2017 to 2022.

Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms most stock market indices from 2017 to 2022. As of early-January 2023, the U.S. Patent and Trademark O

+See More

Self-Improvement Book Review: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.

Dan Rochefort

2026-05-01 11:26:00 Friday ET

Self-Improvement Book Review: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.

Stephen Covey describes the 7 key habits and life principles for us to better solve both personal problems and professional challenges. In a smarter way, we

+See More