Daily Management Review

Taxi aggregator Grab announces details of its IPO on NASDAQ


04/14/2021


Singapore-based taxi aggregator Grab, popular in Asia, officially announced preliminary parameters for its initial public offering in the US, which was previously only known with reference to media sources.



Jon Russell
Jon Russell
Grab said the offering will take place over the next several months on the NASDAQ exchange, with shares trading under the symbol GRAB. The company expects to raise about $4.5 billion for its shares in the IPO, and investors could value the entire company at $40 billion.

The offering will take place as part of a merger with a special purpose entity (SPAC) called Altimeter Growth, which already trades on NASDAQ. Compared to a traditional IPO, carried out with the help of investment banks-underwriters, the placement process with the help of SPAC is cheaper and easier, negotiations on such a merger are less transparent, the company's valuation is less based on actual demand from investors, and the company's financial results are not so strictly checked.

The Grab IPO could be not only one of the world's largest this year, but also a record for SPAC offerings. According to research firm GlobalData, from January to early April, a record $87.6 billion in so-called SPAC IPOs were raised in the US, with a total of 301 such offerings since the start of the year.

source: reuters.com