Why do they get IPO pricing so wrong, and at whose expense?
IPO Pricing — Why do they get it so wrong, and at whose expense?
IPO Pricing — Why do they get it so wrong, and at whose expense?
Who is disenchanted with the IPO of the Silicon Valley ‘Tech Startup’, oh wait — the office space provider with a tech slant — Wework, and the subsequent meltdown in its valuation?
SoftBank, the lead investor, had pumped We Work’s valuation to $47 bn , with over $10 billion of earlier investments, in the run up to its IPO to be led by JP Morgan, which floundered spectacularly bringing down WeWork’s latest valuation to $8 billion. Among the many concerns that made prospective IPO investors anxious, were the flamboyant CEO Neumann’s many deals, and his voting rights which gave him 20 times the voting rights of other shareholders in a dual class share structure, and extra ordinary spending by We Work to look good for the IPO.
After the doomed IPO drew publicity, JP Morgan stated “ Just because a previous funding round has put the valuation at a certain level, does not mean that the valuation was correct”.
And we thought, investment banks were authorities on the matter of private company valuations! (like that of We Work, pre-IPO). And certainly the investment banks that are lead managing an IPO! I have been saying since 2017 in public forums that investment banks are no experts at valuation, and they simply rely on a demand supply equation and a simpler process of order book building to arrive at an IPO’s price, which can be accomplished much more efficiently and without human bias and conflicts of interest, by algorithms.
If investment banks have neither the expertise to do a correct valuation (despite their impeccable reputation to do just that), nor the prudence and caution to exercise in matters of public interest such as a $47 bn IPO which would draw the savings of a many retail investor, nor the accountability for getting a valuation wrong (as borne by JP Morgan’s irresponsible statement above), why do we accord them the respect of never bypassing them, and worse still why do we pay them for getting it so wrong, in such a conflicted way? Banks will always be conflicted, and there is no way around it.
In the entire history of IPOs, very few companies have done their own IPOs (Spotify — without investment banks entirely) , or streamlined and efficient IPOs (Pages Jaunes, Slack) where some parts of the process were still outsourced to investment banks, for which the banks got paid far less than what they would usually. Otherwise, banks skim a neat 7–10% off any IPO. Wonder why Saudi Aramco’s mega IPO has investment banks falling over themselves to woo the Saudi Govt?
If this story of conflicts intrigues you, read my white paper on HCX here.
Soft Bank’s Vision Fund size is $100 billion, and Soft Bank’s promoter Masayoshi Son was a lead investor in We Work. With an investor so fabled, with such a gigantic vision, and with dozens of storied investments to their credit, how could Son and SoftBank get it so wrong? Yet, they did. This is the fallacy, I am sure, the many other investors that accompanied Mr Son in We Work, fell susceptible to. Yet, group think happens, regularly, and this is the ‘Black Swan’ effect that Nassim Nicholas Taleb has eloquently described. We Work was an anomaly; an anomaly in the ‘Platforms’ with ‘Network Effects’ era , or platforms that democratise access to a good that was earlier only available through a centralised intermediary — like ‘airbnb’, or platforms that cater to the gig economy — like ‘geek squad’, or the otherwise disenfranchised, or social platforms for a niche category with a shared interest — like ‘soundcloud’ that empowers anyone to be an artist and distribute their works etc. We Work was a plain old physical co-working space landlord, with a global brand. We Work did not even own much real estate to its name, before its unicorn valuations that is, which enabled it to lease humongous spaces at premier locations like London, Tokyo, Shanghai. I recently attended the Bloomberg Breakaway CEO Summit with Intercontinental Hotels CEO Keith, whose company suffers unoccupied hotel rooms and competitive pricing for unsold rooms, and the accompanying rise of a dozen digital platforms to aggregate and sell hotel rooms cheaply and sometimes anonymously like ‘hotel tonite’ all due to the unstoppable success of airbnb. Yet, Silicon Valley fell prey to their consistent affliction of herd thinking and herd valuation, where they chase the few investable unicorn prospects first found by one or two VCs, and the rest balloon the hell out of their valuations, because no VC wants to be out of the valuation round once 1 or 2 VCs are in.
Ray Dalio recently wrote an eye opening piece where he said the world’s surfeit capital is chasing decent quality , capital safe, investment opportunities which are getting dearer, that is pushing the global yields down to negative levels, as this investable capital is growing, the investment opportunities are scarce, and the managers of capital are also guilty of seeking economies of scale in their hunting efforts (meaning they would rather invest $1 billion in 1 single company, than invest $1 million in a 1000 startups).
What is the point of all my above stories?
That, no matter how influential the investors or fund managers that are part of the funding round, and no matter how high the valuation, there comes a point of recknoning for the unicorn, as well as its investors, where the public has to buy into their valuation and support the share prices. Otherwise the private valuation is just that, notional, only good for a merry-go-around kind of private sale to another gullible believing VC. So, if the public and secondary markets ultimately determine the real share price of any company, and its sustainable valuation, why do investors bother valuing it so highly in the first place, and why do they bother getting valued by an investment bank, sometimes in huge dissonance and divergence from the fundamentals of a company? Signalling.
VCs are no valuation prophets. They get success, meaning their inflated valuations are also later supported by public, enabling them to exit at attractive multiples, mostly in cases where the public was not privy to the exclusive technology innovation, or the secret sauce of the investment opportunity and the VC had access to privileged information, and in many cases only VCs and big funds do have access to these early stage rounds, and not the public, however much the public may be savvily tracking a promising startup, and however much they may want to invest early. There simply aren’t such opportunities where a common man gets access to invest in a google or Apple, in its early years. I have written elaborate articles on this earlier (on democratisation of early stage investment opportunities) which are accessible on my Linkedin.
So, What is the science behind IPO pricing?
Its pretty simple. Order book-building.
Even if the banks have you believe, their highly paid analysts have crunched the numbers and given out nice looking tables and charts of valuation multiples, peer comparisons, DCF valuation, sales multiples etc, all that data is not what determines the IPO pricing. One thing and only one thing determines the IPO pricing (if an investment bank did its job right of sounding the investors) and that is building an order book and determining the cut off price point at which the issue is slightly unerpriced, and the funding raised would sufficiently cover the company’s IPO fundraising target. (Prof Ashwath Damodaran, the traditional valuation guru, has got into many a tiff with the Silicon Valley VC, for not ‘getting’ the valuation of ‘platforms with network effects’ like Uber, and I am certain he will also not be aligned with Softbank on WeWork’s valuation. )
Yet, Why did JP Morgan get the valuation so wrong? $46 billion vs $8 billion in a matter of 2 months, in absence of scandals, no drastic change in company performance, and no force- majeure events. Because, banks are not to be trusted with valuations. They will always be conflicted. They also have VCs on their side, supporting the ever upward buoyancy of valuations. Albeit, some VCs are introspecting in the wake of WeWork fiasco.
Read: https://www.battery.com/powered/back-to-black-thoughts-on-vc-valuation-in-the-wake-of-wework/
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