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

Yale economist Stephen Roach warns that America has much to lose from the current trade war with China for a few reasons.

Joseph Corr

2018-07-13 09:41:00 Friday ET

Yale economist Stephen Roach warns that America has much to lose from the current trade war with China for a few reasons.

Yale economist Stephen Roach warns that America has much to lose from the current trade war with China for a few reasons. First, America is highly dependent

+See More

Financial institutions benefit from higher equity risk premiums and interest rate spreads.

Charlene Vos

2017-04-01 06:40:00 Saturday ET

Financial institutions benefit from higher equity risk premiums and interest rate spreads.

With the current interest rate hike, large banks and insurance companies are likely to benefit from higher equity risk premiums and interest rate spreads.

+See More

Chinese trade delegation offers to boost purchases of U.S. agricultural products to reach an interim trade deal with the Trump administration.

Peter Prince

2019-11-03 12:30:00 Sunday ET

Chinese trade delegation offers to boost purchases of U.S. agricultural products to reach an interim trade deal with the Trump administration.

Chinese trade delegation offers to boost purchases of U.S. agricultural products to reach an interim trade deal with the Trump administration. Chinese Vice

+See More

The top Sino-U.S. tech titans now reach the trademark total market capitalization of $4 trillion as of July 2018.

Fiona Sydney

2018-07-07 10:33:00 Saturday ET

The top Sino-U.S. tech titans now reach the trademark total market capitalization of $4 trillion as of July 2018.

The east-west tech rivalry intensifies between BATs (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent) and FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google). These Sino-U.S.

+See More

Personal finance and investment author Thomas Corley studies and shares the rich habits of self-made millionaires.

Charlene Vos

2018-03-23 08:26:00 Friday ET

Personal finance and investment author Thomas Corley studies and shares the rich habits of self-made millionaires.

Personal finance and investment author Thomas Corley studies and shares the rich habits of self-made millionaires. Corley has spent 5 years studying the dai

+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