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

The Phillips curve becomes the Phillips cloud with no inexorable trade-off between inflation and unemployment.

Fiona Sydney

2019-08-02 17:39:00 Friday ET

The Phillips curve becomes the Phillips cloud with no inexorable trade-off between inflation and unemployment.

The Phillips curve becomes the Phillips cloud with no inexorable trade-off between inflation and unemployment. Stanford finance professor John Cochrane disa

+See More

CNBC news anchor Becky Quick interviews Warren Buffett in early-2019.

James Campbell

2019-04-07 13:39:00 Sunday ET

CNBC news anchor Becky Quick interviews Warren Buffett in early-2019.

CNBC news anchor Becky Quick interviews Warren Buffett in early-2019. Buffett explains the fact that book value fluctuations are a metric that has lost rele

+See More

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin indicates that the Trump team puts the trade war with China on hold.

Olivia London

2018-05-19 09:29:00 Saturday ET

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin indicates that the Trump team puts the trade war with China on hold.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin indicates that the Trump team puts the trade war with China on hold. The interim suspension of U.S. tariffs should offer in

+See More

President Trump signs an executive order to freeze federal employee pay in early-2019.

Rose Prince

2019-01-06 08:39:00 Sunday ET

President Trump signs an executive order to freeze federal employee pay in early-2019.

President Trump signs an executive order to freeze federal employee pay in early-2019. Federal employees face furlough or work without pay due to the govern

+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

President Trump meets Chinese President Xi for better economic reforms.

Rose Prince

2017-03-21 09:37:00 Tuesday ET

President Trump meets Chinese President Xi for better economic reforms.

Trump and Xi meet in the most important summit on earth this year. Trump has promised to retaliate against China's currency misalignment, steel trade

+See More