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

President Trump unveils his ambitious $1.5 trillion public infrastructure plan.

Daisy Harvey

2018-02-11 07:30:00 Sunday ET

President Trump unveils his ambitious $1.5 trillion public infrastructure plan.

President Trump unveils his ambitious $1.5 trillion public infrastructure plan. Trump proposes offering $100 billion in federal incentives to encourage stat

+See More

American parents often worry about money and upward mobility for their children.

Becky Berkman

2019-01-03 10:38:00 Thursday ET

American parents often worry about money and upward mobility for their children.

American parents often worry about money and upward mobility for their children. A recent New York Times survey suggests that nowadays American parents spen

+See More

The OECD projects global growth to decline from 3.2% to 2.9% in the current fiscal year 2019-2020.

Rose Prince

2019-10-29 13:36:00 Tuesday ET

The OECD projects global growth to decline from 3.2% to 2.9% in the current fiscal year 2019-2020.

The OECD projects global growth to decline from 3.2% to 2.9% in the current fiscal year 2019-2020. This global economic growth projection represents the slo

+See More

Tech titans from Apple and Amazon to Microsoft and Google can benefit from the G.O.P. tax reform.

James Campbell

2017-12-07 08:31:00 Thursday ET

Tech titans from Apple and Amazon to Microsoft and Google can benefit from the G.O.P. tax reform.

Large multinational tech firms such as Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon can benefit much from the G.O.P. tax reform. A recent stock research r

+See More

Agile business firms beat the odds by building faster institutional reflexes to anticipate plausible economic scenarios.

Fiona Sydney

2020-09-03 10:26:00 Thursday ET

Agile business firms beat the odds by building faster institutional reflexes to anticipate plausible economic scenarios.

Agile business firms beat the odds by building faster institutional reflexes to anticipate plausible economic scenarios. Christopher Worley, Thomas Willi

+See 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