Exclusive: Airbnb aims to raise roughly $3 billion in IPO - sources
Send a link to a friend
[October 03, 2020] By
Anirban Sen and Joshua Franklin
(Reuters) - Home rental company Airbnb Inc
is aiming to raise around $3 billion in its upcoming initial public
offering (IPO), people familiar with the matter said on Friday, taking
advantage of the unexpectedly sharp recovery in its business after the
COVID-19 pandemic roiled the travel industry.
Airbnb will be one of the largest and most anticipated U.S. stock market
listings of 2020 which has already been a blockbuster year for IPOs,
featuring the likes of record label Warner Music Group <WMG.O>, data
analytics firm Palantir Technologies <PLTR.N> and data warehouse company
Snowflake Inc <SNOW.N>.
Airbnb said in August it had filed confidentially for an IPO with U.S.
regulators.
The company's current plan is to make its filing publicly available in
November after the U.S presidential election and is targeting an IPO
some time in December, the sources said, requesting anonymity as the
plans are private.
The sources cautioned that the timing is subject to change and market
conditions, in particular volatility that could come from the election.
A spokesman for Airbnb declined to comment.
The company could achieve a valuation of more than $30 billion in the
IPO, the sources added, again cautioning this was subject to market
conditions.
This would be substantially higher than the $18 billion Airbnb was
valued at in April when it raised $2 billion in debt from investors.
Airbnb's most recent independent appraisal of the fair market value of
its stock pegged its worth at around $21 billion.
[to top of second column] |
A woman talks on the phone at the Airbnb office headquarters in the
SOMA district of San Francisco, California, U.S., August 2, 2016.
REUTERS/Gabrielle Lurie/File Photo
The push to go public and the growth in its potential valuation underscores
Airbnb's dramatic recovery from earlier this year when it secured emergency
funding from investors and the outlook for the travel industry was uncertain.
Since then, San Francisco-based Airbnb has benefited as travelers shy away from
larger hotels and instead prefer to drive to local vacation rentals.
The company said in July that customers had booked more than 1 million nights in
a single day for the first time since March 3.
Shares of U.S. online travel agency Booking Holdings Inc <BKNG.O>, which some
Airbnb investors use as a conservative public market proxy for its own stock,
have rebounded more than 35% in the past six months.
Reuters reported last month that billionaire investor William Ackman had
approached Airbnb about going public through a reverse merger with his
blank-check company but that Airbnb was prioritizing going public through a
traditional IPO.
(Reporting by Anirban Sen in Bangalore and Joshua Franklin in New York; Editing
by Cynthia Osterman)
[© 2020 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2020 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Thompson Reuters is solely responsible for this content.
|