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

Zillow share price plunges 20% year-to-date as Redfin and Trulia also experience an economic slowdown in the real estate market.

Daisy Harvey

2018-11-17 09:33:00 Saturday ET

Zillow share price plunges 20% year-to-date as Redfin and Trulia also experience an economic slowdown in the real estate market.

Zillow share price plunges 20% year-to-date as its competitors Redfin and Trulia also experience an economic slowdown in the real estate market. The real es

+See More

Stock Synopsis: With a new Python program, we use, adapt, apply, and leverage each of the mainstream Gemini Gen AI models to conduct this comprehensive fundamental analysis of Uber Technologies (U.S. stock symbol: $UBER).

Daphne Basel

2025-10-10 12:31:00 Friday ET

Stock Synopsis: With a new Python program, we use, adapt, apply, and leverage each of the mainstream Gemini Gen AI models to conduct this comprehensive fundamental analysis of Uber Technologies (U.S. stock symbol: $UBER).

Stock Synopsis: With a new Python program, we use, adapt, apply, and leverage each of the mainstream Gemini Gen AI models to conduct this comprehensive fund

+See More

U.S. judiciary subcommittee delves into the market dominance of online platforms in terms of the antitrust, commercial, and administrative law in America.

Daphne Basel

2021-11-22 11:29:00 Monday ET

U.S. judiciary subcommittee delves into the market dominance of online platforms in terms of the antitrust, commercial, and administrative law in America.

U.S. judiciary subcommittee delves into the market dominance of online platforms in terms of the antitrust, commercial, and administrative law in America.

+See More

Dr Kai-Fu Lee praises China as the next epicenter of artificial intelligence and smart data analysis.

Peter Prince

2017-12-01 06:30:00 Friday ET

Dr Kai-Fu Lee praises China as the next epicenter of artificial intelligence and smart data analysis.

Dr Kai-Fu Lee praises China as the next epicenter of artificial intelligence, smart data analysis, and robotic automation. With prior IT careers at Apple, M

+See More

Mario Draghi declares the ECB agreement on a thorny set of revisions to Basel 3.

Rose Prince

2017-11-25 06:34:00 Saturday ET

Mario Draghi declares the ECB agreement on a thorny set of revisions to Basel 3.

Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank, heads the international committee of financial supervisors and has declared their landmark agreement o

+See More

Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon account for more than 15% of market capitalization of the U.S. stock market.

Jacob Miramar

2017-05-19 09:39:00 Friday ET

Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon account for more than 15% of market capitalization of the U.S. stock market.

FAMGA stands for Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. These tech giants account for more than 15% of market capitalization of the American stock

+See More