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Spotify has finally filed for an initial public offering:
Spotify, the world's largest music streaming service, has filed for an initial public offering today. The Sweden-based company co-founded by Daniel Ek, who has remained its CEO since its 2006 inception, and Martin Lorentzon has more than 71 million paying users as of December 2017. The company also enjoys an overall user base that includes ad-supported free listeners of 159 million, far outpacing the competition from Apple, Google, Tidal, and others. Spotify will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "SPOT."
Spotify will be offering a direct listing, meaning that its shares can be traded on the open market sooner than with a more conventional IPO, as Spotify doesn't intend to raise a large amount of capital with its IPO. According to CNBC, the price of Spotify shares traded on private markets indicate the company could be worth as much as $23 billion.
The filing gives us one of our best looks yet at Spotify's finances, with the company posting revenue last year of €4,090 million (nearly $5 billion) and a net loss of -€1,235 million (or ~$1.5 billion) for the same period.
Also at TechCrunch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 01 2018, @10:44AM (1 child)
Raising capital and democratizing ownership are very important to a functioning society.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday March 02 2018, @03:38AM
There is a difference between entrepreneurial capitalism and stakeholder capitalism, one that I don't think gets anywhere near enough exposure. If you actually think the stock market democratizes wealth, rather than acting as probably *the* single most powerful funnel to the ultra-wealthy, you're either ignorant or delusional.
Besides which, our money is floating, fiat currency. It has no value in and of itself. It's not backed by anything. Our money, to use a physics analogy, is a boson, not a fermion; it's the mediator between assets, work, goods, and services, not any of these itself. When the velocity of money is slowed or stopped--for example, offshore hoarding or locking it all up in solid assets somewhere--the economy suffers and eventually disintegrates, exactly the way a proton would if the gluons in it suddenly stopped exerting the strong nuclear force.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...