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

Goldman Sachs takes a $5 billion net income hit that results from its offshore cash repatriation under the Trump tax law.

Charlene Vos

2018-01-02 12:39:00 Tuesday ET

Goldman Sachs takes a $5 billion net income hit that results from its offshore cash repatriation under the Trump tax law.

Goldman Sachs takes a $5 billion net income hit that results from its offshore cash repatriation under the new Trump tax law. This income hit reflects 10%-1

+See More

Apple pursues an early harvest strategy that focuses on extracting healthy profits from the Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

Monica McNeil

2017-05-01 09:45:00 Monday ET

Apple pursues an early harvest strategy that focuses on extracting healthy profits from the Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

Apple now pursues an early harvest strategy that focuses on extracting healthy profits from a relatively static market for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, all of

+See More

Better corporate governance through worldwide convergence toward Berle-Means stock ownership dispersion

Fiona Sydney

2023-12-05 09:25:00 Tuesday ET

Better corporate governance through worldwide convergence toward Berle-Means stock ownership dispersion

Better corporate ownership governance through worldwide convergence toward Berle-Means stock ownership dispersion   Abstract We design a model

+See More

American allies assist AT&T and Verizon in implementing 5G telecommunication technology.

Daisy Harvey

2019-01-01 03:34:48 Tuesday ET

American allies assist AT&T and Verizon in implementing 5G telecommunication technology.

American allies assist AT&T and Verizon in implementing 5G telecommunication technology in the U.S. as such allies ban the use of HuaWei 5G telecom equi

+See More

Federal Reserve's QE exit strategy makes sense ahead of Fed Chair Janet Yellen's stepdown in 2018.

Chanel Holden

2017-03-27 06:33:00 Monday ET

Federal Reserve's QE exit strategy makes sense ahead of Fed Chair Janet Yellen's stepdown in 2018.

Goldman Sachs chief economist Jan Hatzius says the Federal Reserve's QE exit strategy makes sense ahead of Fed Chair Janet Yellen's stepdown in 2018

+See More

Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms most stock market indices from 2017 to 2023.

Daisy Harvey

2023-02-03 08:27:00 Friday ET

Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms most stock market indices from 2017 to 2023.

Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms most stock market indices from 2017 to 2023. Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms the ma

+See More