The first of many tech companies file for IPO.
2019 is the year of tech companies filing for Initial Public Offering. If you didn’t know an IPO is “the process of offering shares in a private corporation to the public for the first time.” Lyft is the first of many to file in the much anticipated 2019 IPO offering. The reason for the anticipation of the 2019 IPOs is due to the fact that many of the filings are coming from tech companies that are very prominent in everyday use. Many investors want to invest because they see the digital trend increasingly getting more popular every day. On Friday, Lyft made it official by filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Many believe that the IPO will be around $25 Billion. So why is Lyft’s IPO predicted to be around $25 Billion? It all starts with the financials. Lyft said its revenue grew from “$343.3 million in 2016 to $1.1 billion in 2017 and $2.2 billion in 2018, a year-over-year growth rate of 209 percent and 103 percent, respectively”. In addition, its losses grew, from “$682 million in 2016 to $911 million last year.” Lyft will most likely be on the NASDAQ starting this April (LYFT).
Some other companies that plan on filing for IPO are Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, Palantir, and Slack. “Lyft became the first unicorn of 2019 to file its S-1 registration statement, indicating a strong start to the year for unicorn IPOs,” said Rob Peters, senior director at SEC compliance analytics firm Intelligize. Once private companies go public everyone is able to see all the internal workings from behind the scenes. During the filing, Lyft came out and stated that they had “30.7 million riders in the US and Canada in 2018 and that it had 1.9 million drivers last year.” Lyft also handled more than 1 billion rides.
According to research from Lyft, 95% of the US population has the ability to use Lyft. Lyft mentions that “almost half of our riders reported that they use their cars less because of Lyft, and 22% reported that owning a car has become less important” to them. In addition, Lyft increased its active riders by 47% in the fourth quarter of 2018.
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