The New World of Investing in IPO’s
If you’re into the world of investing, you know what an IPO, or Initial Public Offering, is. This is when companies offer shares to the general public in an attempt to raise funds; the transaction that defines the difference between privately held and publicly traded. However, Spotify’s offering is very different from anything we’ve ever seen before. Today, we’ll talk about how the Spotify IPO is unique.
Bell-Ringing… Spotify Won’t Be Taking Part!
When an IPO launches, the CEO or other members from the company’s team of executives will generally ring the opening bell or closing bell for the stock exchange on which it goes public. However, that won’t be the case for Spotify. In fact, the company won’t be engaging in any self promotion or congratulatory events on the day it goes public.
That’s right, the CEO won’t be on the trading floor on April third talking about the company. Not to mention, there will not be any parties to celebrate the going public milestone. In a recent statement, Daniel Ek, CEO and founder at Spotify, had the following to offer:
“For us, going public has never really been about the pop or circumstance of it all…”
New Shares… No Need!
Even more interestingly, Spotify will not be offering any NEW shares during its IPO! In general, when a company launches its IPO,that company will offer new shares of the stock to those that purchase through the IPO. However, Spotify is going about things in a very unconventional way.
In a recent announcement, the company said that it would not be offering new shares. Instead, all Spotify shares included in the IPO are shares held by existing shareholders. While this is very unorthodox, it’s actually very interesting and could be for a very good reason.
When new shares are included in an IPO, they are traditionally known as a lockup period. However, by only offering shares that are already held by existing shareholders, there will be no lockup period enforced by Wall Street underwriters. Is this a positive or negative? Well, no one really knows as we’ve never seen anything like this before. However, it does provide some advantages that could cause further demand among the investing public.
No Closed-Door Promotion
Finally, when a company launches an IPO, there’s quite a bit of awareness building that happens to take place. Much of this awareness building is done behind closed doors on road shows. However, Spotify has made it clear that they will not be doing any closed door promotion of the IPO. Instead, everything done will be public knowledge.
This was taken a step further on Thursday when the company first live streamed a road show. Here’s the link to the archived video. While this is unorthodox yet again, it could prove to be a positive as it will likely lead to investors enjoying the added transparency.
Final Thoughts
IPOs happen all of the time. However, this particular IPO is like nothing the market has ever seen before. Without private meetings, bell ringing events, interviews and new shares, Spotify is setting the stage for a very interesting first trading session on March 3rd.
