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

Management consultants can build sustainable trust-driven client relations through the accelerant curve of business value creation.

Monica McNeil

2020-11-17 08:27:00 Tuesday ET

Management consultants can build sustainable trust-driven client relations through the accelerant curve of business value creation.

Management consultants can build sustainable trust-driven client relations through the accelerant curve of business value creation. Alan Weiss (2016)

+See More

Macro eigenvalue volatility helps predict some recent episodes of high economic policy uncertainty.

James Campbell

2020-09-15 08:38:00 Tuesday ET

Macro eigenvalue volatility helps predict some recent episodes of high economic policy uncertainty.

Macro eigenvalue volatility helps predict some recent episodes of high economic policy uncertainty, recession risk, or rare events such as the recent rampan

+See 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

Apple upstream semiconductor chipmaker TSMC boosts capital expenditures to $15 billion with almost 10% revenue growth by December 2019.

John Fourier

2019-11-11 09:36:00 Monday ET

Apple upstream semiconductor chipmaker TSMC boosts capital expenditures to $15 billion with almost 10% revenue growth by December 2019.

Apple upstream semiconductor chipmaker TSMC boosts capital expenditures to $15 billion with almost 10% revenue growth by December 2019. Due to high global d

+See More

Many young and mid-career Americans fall into the financial distress trap in rural communities.

John Fourier

2019-08-01 11:33:00 Thursday ET

Many young and mid-career Americans fall into the financial distress trap in rural communities.

Many young and mid-career Americans fall into the financial distress trap in rural communities. A recent analysis of 25,800 zip codes for 99% of the U.S. po

+See More

Calomiris and Haber delve into the comparative analysis of bank crises and politics in America, Britain, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil.

Dan Rochefort

2023-04-14 13:32:00 Friday ET

Calomiris and Haber delve into the comparative analysis of bank crises and politics in America, Britain, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil.

Calomiris and Haber delve into the comparative analysis of bank crises and politics in America, Britain, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil. Charles Calomiris an

+See More