Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Tech IPOs Aren’t Working for the Masses

Wow! What does this say for these companies and for the market?   Aivars Lode

The market for initial public offerings has taken a hit, and it would be easy to lay the blame on an overhyped office-sharing outfit and a maker of $2,000 exercise bikes.
Reality is more complicated though. The fact is, even many of the seemingly hot debuts this year have been much less so for most ordinary investors. Most big new tech issues from this year are trading below their opening prices from their first day of trading. That includes several that scored strong first-day “pops” relative to their public offering prices. This was the case even before WeWork pulled its listing plans last month, casting a pall over the IPO market that carried over to Peloton’s disappointing debut late last week.
Of the 14 notable tech IPOs so far this year, only three—Zoom Video, Pinterest and Fastly —are currently above their first-day opens, based on Monday’s closing prices. The broader IPO market has fared a little better, though not by much. About one-third of IPOs tracked by Dealogic this year are above their opening prices.

Monday, September 30, 2019

WeWork Still Needs Cash After Officially Pulling IPO

SO how many other Unicorns are going to have to go this route and what will that mean for the markets generally?  ...Aivars Lode

For years, WeWork’s parent company was defined by big spending as it relentlessly pursued rapid growth. 
Now, in the aftermath of a botched initial public offering attempt and the ouster of co-founderand chief executive Adam Neumann, it is facing a different reality: It needs to stop bleeding cash. 
On Monday, We Co. said it would file a request to withdraw its initial public offering filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company said it is postponing its IPO to focus on its core business and that it has “every intention to operate WeWork as a public company” but didn’t provide a time frame.
To cut costs, the new co-CEOs, Sebastian Gunningham and Artie Minson, are planning thousands of job cuts, putting extraneous businesses up for sale and purging some luxuries from the previous CEO, like the G650ER jet the company purchased for more than $60 million last year, people familiar with the matter have said.