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About an hour by rapid train northwest of Shanghai, China in the city of Changzhou (pop: 5.2 million) are the offices of Jin Medical International, a maker of “high-end” wheelchairs. Incorporated in the Cayman Islands in January 2020, Jin’s wheelchairs are known for being ergonomic and lightweight and recently the company began making electric and ski-friendly models. Last March, with the help of a little known New York-based underwriter named Prime Number Capital LLC….….Story continues…

By: Brandon Kochkodin 

Source: Forbes

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Critics: 

After the IPO, shares are traded freely in the open market at what is known as the free float. Stock exchanges stipulate a minimum free float both in absolute terms (the total value as determined by the share price multiplied by the number of shares sold to the public) and as a proportion of the total share capital (i.e., the number of shares sold to the public divided by the total shares outstanding).

Although IPO offers many benefits, there are also significant costs involved, chiefly those associated with the process such as banking and legal fees, and the ongoing requirement to disclose important and sometimes sensitive information. Details of the proposed offering are disclosed to potential purchasers in the form of a lengthy document known as a prospectus. Most companies undertake an IPO with the assistance of an investment banking firm acting in the capacity of an underwriter.

Underwriters provide several services, including help with correctly assessing the value of shares (share price) and establishing a public market for shares (initial sale). Alternative methods such as the Dutch auction have also been explored and applied for several IPOs. When a company becomes publicly listed, the money paid by the investing public for the newly issued shares goes directly to the company (primary offering) as well as to any early private investors who opt to sell all or a portion of their holdings (secondary offerings) as part of the larger IPO.

An IPO, therefore, allows a company to tap into a wide pool of potential investors to provide itself with capital for future growth, repayment of the debt, or working capital. A company selling common shares is never required to repay the capital to its public investors. Those investors must endure the unpredictable nature of the open market to price and trade their shares. After the IPO, when shares are traded in the market, money passes between public investors.

For early private investors who choose to sell shares as part of the IPO process, the IPO represents an opportunity to monetize their investment. After the IPO, once shares are traded in the open market, investors holding large blocks of shares can either sell those shares piecemeal in the open market or sell a large block of shares directly to the public, at a fixed price, through a secondary market offering. This type of offering is not dilutive since no new shares are being created.

Stock prices can change dramatically during a company’s first days in the public market. Once a company is listed, it is able to issue additional common shares in a number of different ways, one of which is the follow-on offering. This method provides capital for various corporate purposes through the issuance of equity (see stock dilution) without incurring any debt. This ability to quickly raise potentially large amounts of capital from the marketplace is a key reason many companies seek to go public.

An IPO accords several benefits to the previously private company:

• Enlarging and diversifying equity base
• Enabling cheaper access to capital
• Increasing exposure, prestige, and public image
• Attracting and retaining better management and employees through liquid equity participation
• Facilitating acquisitions (potentially in return for shares of stock)
• Creating multiple financing opportunities: equity, convertible debt, cheaper bank loans, etc.
• Benefits for pre-IPO owners in the form of Tax Receivable AgreementsIPOs generally involve one or more investment banks known as “underwriters”. The company offering its shares, called the “issuer”, enters into a contract with a lead underwriter to sell its shares to the public. The underwriter then approaches investors with offers to sell those shares. A large IPO is usually underwritten by a “syndicate” of investment banks, the largest of which take the position of “lead underwriter”. Upon selling the shares, the underwriters retain a portion of the proceeds as their fee.

This fee is called an underwriting spread. The spread is calculated as a discount from the price of the shares sold (called the gross spread). Components of an underwriting spread in an initial public offering (IPO) typically include the following (on a per-share basis): manager’s fee, underwriting fee—earned by members of the syndicate, and the concession—earned by the broker-dealer selling the shares. The manager would be entitled to the entire underwriting spread.

A member of the syndicate is entitled to the underwriting fee and the concession. A broker-dealer who is not a member of the syndicate but sells shares would receive only the concession, while the member of the syndicate who provided the shares to that broker-dealer would retain the underwriting fee. Usually, the managing/lead underwriter, also known as the bookrunner, typically the underwriter selling the largest proportions of the IPO, takes the highest portion of the gross spread, up to 8% in some cases.

Multinational IPOs may have many syndicates to deal with differing legal requirements in both the issuer’s domestic market and other regions. For example, an issuer based in the E.U. may be represented by the major selling syndicate in its domestic market, Europe, in addition to separate group corporations or selling them for US/Canada and Asia. Usually, the lead underwriter in the head selling group is also the lead bank in the other selling groups.

Because of the wide array of legal requirements and because it is an expensive process, IPOs also typically involve one or more law firms with major practices in securities law, such as the Magic Circle firms of London and the white-shoe firms of New York City. Financial historians Richard Sylla and Robert E. Wright have shown that before 1860 most early U.S. corporations sold shares in themselves directly to the public without the aid of intermediaries like investment banks.

The direct public offering (DPO), as they term it, was not done by auction but rather at a share price set by the issuing corporation. In this sense, it is the same as the fixed price public offers that were the traditional IPO method in most non-US countries in the early 1990s. The DPO eliminated the agency problem associated with offerings intermediated by investment banks. Prior to 2009, the United States was the leading issuer of IPOs in terms of total value.

Since that time, however, China (Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hong Kong) has been the leading issuer, raising $73 billion (almost double the amount of money raised on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq combined) up to the end of November 2011. India was the second-biggest IPO market in 2024, with $20.5 billion raised via 91 offerings.

Can corporate events be sexy? This IPO-bound company thinks so.  23:32 Fri, 19 Dec