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 world seeks to reduce medicine prices and other health care costs to better regulate big pharma.

Daisy Harvey

2019-06-07 04:02:05 Friday ET

The world seeks to reduce medicine prices and other health care costs to better regulate big pharma.

The world seeks to reduce medicine prices and other health care costs to better regulate big pharma. Nowadays the Trump administration requires pharmaceutic

+See More

Stock Synopsis: ESG value and momentum stock market portfolio strategies

Fiona Sydney

2024-03-26 09:30:00 Tuesday ET

Stock Synopsis: ESG value and momentum stock market portfolio strategies

Stock Synopsis: ESG value and momentum stock market portfolio strategies Since 2013, we have been delving into the broad topics of ESG (Environmental, So

+See More

China allows its renminbi currency to slide below the psychologically important threshold of 7-yuan per U.S. dollar.

Charlene Vos

2019-09-13 10:37:00 Friday ET

China allows its renminbi currency to slide below the psychologically important threshold of 7-yuan per U.S. dollar.

China allows its renminbi currency to slide below the key psychologically important threshold of 7-yuan per U.S. dollar. A currency dispute between the U.S.

+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

Trump's presidential election victory caused an unpredictable *black swan* in almost every non-U.S. stock market in the world.

Fiona Sydney

2016-11-09 00:00:00 Wednesday ET

Trump's presidential election victory caused an unpredictable *black swan* in almost every non-U.S. stock market in the world.

Universally dismissed as a vanity presidential candidate when he entered a field crowded with Republican talent, the former Democrat and former Independent

+See More

Thomas Piketty frames economic inequality as a global phenomenon.

Apple Boston

2017-01-11 11:38:00 Wednesday ET

Thomas Piketty frames economic inequality as a global phenomenon.

Thomas Piketty's recent new book *Capital in the Twenty-First Century* frames income and wealth inequality now as a global economic phenomenon. When

+See More