I don’t totally get the Sturm und Drang around the Facebook IPO. There may prove to be some issues around disclosure, NASDAQ, stabilizing of price, and anything else someone wants to raise to support their own agenda. However, I said yesterday on Bloomberg Hays Advantage that from the company’s point of view, this was a very successful IPO. The company issued public stock against a set of governance issues that in many instances would not have allowed a “normal” company to face its shareholders with a straight face. The underwriting fees were at a discount to “normal” fees. It basically got the near term high tick on the stock price. It was the third largest raise in the history of IPOs and put additional capital in the company’s coffers and provided more immediate liquidity for its private equity investors than one would ordinarily see on an initial offering. Even with the decline in the stock price, this company is being valued at around $60 Billion, significant multiples of revenues and earnings. Certainly, the senior executives are expecting to continue to build a company over a long time period and have the ability to control that build, given the degrees of freedom to do so without interference from their shareholders. Today’s price of the stock is of less concern to them. The public shareholders can only vote by buying more stock or selling it. They have very limited say in the governance of the company. The 26 pages of risk factors in the S-1, the filing statement, clearly spelled that out.
From the underwriters’ perspective it doesn’t look as good. Underwriting does involve taking risk. There is always an attempt by the underwriters to leave something on the table. It takes out a fair amount of their risk and makes room to exercise the “shoe” to sell more stock (and generate more fees) above the original offering amount. The demand appeared to be there, but with some pushing from the company, I am sure, the price and amount were raised, as was the risk. The world of IPOs has changed though, given the increase in high-frequency trading and the increasing presence of hedge funds in the IPO process. While most companies would prefer to see their stock go into the hands of long-term investors, the underwriters have a client constituency that, implied or otherwise, expects to get significant participation in a hot IPO because of all the other business they do with the investment bank. In this instance there was also a decision made to put more of this stock into the hands of a less-informed individual investor. I would like to know how many of those individual investors actually read the S-1 before they made their decision to buy the stock.
In addition, the concept of being able to “stabilize” the price movements and trading action around an offering is almost non-existent. The dollars available in the market place to influence price movement overwhelm any amount of capital that the underwriters can put to work. In this instance, even the trading systems, as robust as they are, were not adequate to handle the 80 million shares that ultimately traded in the first thirty seconds after the stock was finally opened, much less the 570 million shares traded in the full day. This was a huge offering of shares of a company operating in a mode of creative destruction of legacy businesses with the volatility associated with that. Exciting, newsworthy, with more news to come over many years. I am most excited about the wealth creation that did occur for those who put their capital and their energy at risk in the creation and early funding of the company. Much of that capital will likely make its way back into the creation of other companies that will take advantage of the phenomena of increased processing speeds and the power of information control put into the hands of individuals. Very, very exciting!
ContraCarbon 