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

Conor McGregor learns a major money lesson from LeBron James.

Daisy Harvey

2019-08-07 12:33:00 Wednesday ET

Conor McGregor learns a major money lesson from LeBron James.

Conor McGregor learns a major money lesson from LeBron James. This lesson suggests that James spends about $1.5 million on his own body each year. The $1.5

+See More

Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms most stock market indices such as S&P 500, Dow Jones, and Nasdaq.

Andy Yeh Alpha

2019-02-01 15:35:00 Friday ET

Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms most stock market indices such as S&P 500, Dow Jones, and Nasdaq.

Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms the major stock market benchmarks such as S&P 500, MSCI, Dow Jones, and Nasdaq. We implem

+See More

Ray Fair applies his macroeconometric model to study the central features of the U.S. macroeconomy such as price stability and full employment in the dual mandate.

Charlene Vos

2023-07-14 10:32:00 Friday ET

Ray Fair applies his macroeconometric model to study the central features of the U.S. macroeconomy such as price stability and full employment in the dual mandate.

Ray Fair applies his macroeconometric model to study the central features of the U.S. macroeconomy such as price stability and full employment in the dual m

+See More

The Trump team blocks Broadcom's bid for Qualcomm due to national security concerns and 5G telecom network issues.

James Campbell

2018-03-06 11:35:00 Tuesday ET

The Trump team blocks Broadcom's bid for Qualcomm due to national security concerns and 5G telecom network issues.

The Trump team blocks Broadcom's bid for Qualcomm due to national economic security concerns and 5G telecom network issues. Broadcom makes microchips fo

+See More

Bridgewater hedge fund founder Ray Dalio suggests that the current state of U.S. capitalism poses an existential threat for many Americans.

Daphne Basel

2019-04-25 09:35:00 Thursday ET

Bridgewater hedge fund founder Ray Dalio suggests that the current state of U.S. capitalism poses an existential threat for many Americans.

Bridgewater hedge fund founder Ray Dalio suggests that the current state of U.S. capitalism poses an existential threat for many Americans. Dalio deems the

+See More

U.S. senators urge the Trump administration to prevent the IMF from bailing out several countries that face predatory Chinese loans.

Chanel Holden

2018-02-01 07:38:00 Thursday ET

U.S. senators urge the Trump administration to prevent the IMF from bailing out several countries that face predatory Chinese loans.

U.S. senators urge the Trump administration with a bipartisan proposal to prevent the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from bailing out several countries t

+See More