Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

t1_izdsl6o wrote

I don't know how I forgot this, but Visa only going public in 2008 is crazy.

744

t1_ize4hm0 wrote

The fact that gm had an ipo in 2010 also makes no sense to me.

295

t1_ize5hzw wrote

They almost went under, were bought by the US government in the recession, the government sorted out their finances, then went public again.

282

t1_izexa4i wrote

FYI the US government only bought 61% of the company; the rest was held by the governments of Canada and Ontario, the unions (UAW and CAW), and GM’s former bondholders.

78

t1_izeze38 wrote

Typically anything over 50% is considered “ownership” given the control that often comes with such a big chunk of a company.

106

t1_izfl54r wrote

That's not really true anymore in corporate America though is it? Shares with 10x voting rights, share with no voting rights etc...

−22

t1_izfqmjc wrote

Those rights aren’t typical for the Fortune 500. Usually found in public former startups like Facebook with powerful founders or investors-turned-owners. Certain rights associated with preferred stock etc. certainly exists but what you’ll see with voting power at Facebook is far and away the exception to the rule.

20

t1_izf1bkz wrote

Sure, but the US government had enough ownership power to make any decisions unilaterally. The other players owned a chunk but were essentially toothless.

20

t1_izg7mmp wrote

Not true. Stocks are divided into preferred and common stocks. The difference is that preferred stocks don't have voting rights; common stocks do.

I know the US government bought preferred stocks, but don't know how much. So, this could imply the US government wasn't the "true main shareholders".

−7

t1_izgs0fu wrote

I assumed that the other person knew more than I did, hence the response I gave. (Which was probably dumb of me!)

2

t1_izh2i3b wrote

No problem, just clarifying, because usually reality is more complex.

2

t1_ize4srh wrote

They went bankrupt in the great recession

81

t1_ize5jpa wrote

Yeah that makes sense. I didn't think about the bailout and how that would affect their public listing. I was just thinking about the historic nature of the company in general.

23

t1_ized2x6 wrote

The US government basically bought the company and then sold it in 2010.

22

t1_izf08e7 wrote

They went bankrupt in 2008, so all their stock got canceled. This is them emerging from bankruptcy and making a shit ton of money doing it.

7

t1_ize5zaa wrote

Not inflation adjusted then?

103

t1_izecfdg wrote

Yeah, this doesn’t really tell us anything.

Edit: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-largest-ipos-adjusted-for-inflation/

Adjusted until Oct 2020… ARAMCO is #2

98

t1_izeu5ii wrote

Better visualization and accurate data. Get this out of this sub right now

39

t1_izev3m3 wrote

It's a little out of date though. There are a few more recent IPOs that would make that list

7

t1_izh7k0h wrote

This leaves out every major tech IPO of the last 5 years. Airbnb IPO'ed for 100B for example.

1

t1_izidimm wrote

The $100B isn't actually using the same metric as the chart though. $100B is the total valuation of the company on the public market, but they "only" raised $3B from the IPO so it wouldn't make this list. These lists usually look at how much cash the company raised from the IPO.

1

t1_izhap67 wrote

The crazy thing is that the ~$25B IPO for Aramco was for something like 1.5% of the company.

The company in total is worth somewhere on the order of $1.9T

1

t1_izdxnr2 wrote

Surprised that many people invest in Anal Spa.

84

t1_izeami1 wrote

Is it odd that I haven't even heard of a few of these?

69

t1_izet483 wrote

Not really, a bunch of them aren't public facing, and a bunch are based on specific countries that you might not live in.

77

t1_izfzfwo wrote

Based on the constant Aramco ads I'm being bombarded with, I think they're trying to change that.

5

t1_izez8yw wrote

A lot of the biggest companies out there don't do work with the general public, they do work with other companies, which makes them a lot less of a household name.

28

t1_izeui61 wrote

I'm assuming this is investment raised at IPO, not market cap at IPO. There's a big difference between the two, and people are generally more familiar with the latter.

50

t1_izfx7nc wrote

Yeah, the heading makes no sense.

​

It is investment raised, which is a weird metric; as you say, the market cap is a much more well-known and probably more interesting metric.

13

t1_izfecws wrote

If it were extrapolated to the total value of a company then Saudi Aramco would be ridiculous

8

t1_izfzp3a wrote

Thank you for saying this. I was thinking have these companies gone up THAT much in just a few years?

3

t1_izi9m26 wrote

I was going to query this. Arm is looking at an IPO at some point over the next year, and according to this it’d easily beat all of these … but then I realised that this can’t be market cap.

1

t1_izetea3 wrote

I have never heard of an IPO. I Googled and I'm still none the wiser lol.

15

t1_izeuhgp wrote

Initial public offering, when a company goes from private to public by issuing stocks.

You create a company which you own a 100% of, but you need to raise more money. You have three primary options.

1- get a loan 2- sell a company to a private investor for a portion of your company. 3- chop up your ownership into tiny bits and sell a portion of it to the public via a stock exchange, anyone can buy and sell it. The first time it hits the market is called IPO.

36

t1_izh4hqs wrote

>You create a company which you own a 100% of, but you need to raise more money.

Highly unlikely. Probably do many rounds of unregistered exempt offerings well before an IPO.

1

t1_izeui16 wrote

Initial public offering, when a company goes from private to public by issuing stocks.

You create a company which you own a 100% of, but you need to raise more money. You have three primary options.

1- get a loan

2- sell a portion of your company to a private investor.

3- chop up your ownership into tiny bits and sell all or a portion of it to the public via a stock exchange, anyone can buy and sell it. The first time it hits the market is called IPO.

11

t1_izewt74 wrote

Thanks. So are they different from a PLC?

0

t1_izf34f5 wrote

I explicitly remember Facebook going public in 2012 and saying "who on earth is buying stock in a myspace knockoff? This thing is going to die just as fast as the other 10" and this is why I'm not a market predictor.

14

t1_izgqesh wrote

Ah yes, 2012 when facebook was just one of the many MySpace clones popping up.

3

OP t1_izdp91i wrote

Source 1 and 2

Newsletter

Tools: Figma

3

t1_izdq0c8 wrote

Whats Figma

24

t1_ize7jv1 wrote

The thing Adobe paid 20B for to get rid of a potential killer competitor, yet nobody has heard of....till today!

3

t1_izf540q wrote

You should post their following stock activity as well with spy as a control for timing and then track the delta/beta and post those against each other for a 5-10 year period

1

t1_izf16d4 wrote

Note that this doesn't reflect the value of the business but only the portion of the business that was floated on the stock market. For instance Aramco only sold 1.5% of the business via their IPO, whereas I think GM sold more like 28% in their 2010 IPO?

3

t1_izf10r2 wrote

It seems like it would be useful to include acquisitions too, since that's the other side of the same coin and those numbers can be absolutely massive too...

I have a consulting firm that finds VC and angel investment for startups, mostly tech and energy, and around a decade ago was working for a finance firm doing similar work... A decade ago when you asked "what is your 'everything worked out perfectly' hope for where this company will be in 5-10 years" you would almost always get "successful IPO". These days when I ask the same question I get a lot more "get bought by titan of the industry company X or Y". Not like nobody wants IPOs anymore by any means, but a lot of people would prefer to sell to Google or Tesla or someone with a favorable deal and an honorary seat at the table afterwards instead of going public.

1

t1_izf3th2 wrote

Wow, apparently Aramco's IPO was for roughly 1.5% of the company's total value (according to investopedia).

1

t1_izfiouu wrote

I'm confused about that. Looking at yahoo finance the difference between their IPO and current price is only ~1.59% as of writing. Google Finance says it's actually down ~6%. What should I be looking at?

1

t1_izfpdx6 wrote

and they are all way less than what Elon Musk paid for Twitter

1

t1_izgaxyy wrote

I don't really understand why the creator of this wouldn't include the meaning of IPO somewhere.

1

t1_izgweou wrote

Are there mega companies that would be #1 if they IPOd?

1

t1_izhc3tk wrote

That would be Aramco. That IPO was a tiny fraction of that company. Given that it’s value is basically the value of all the oil in Saudi Arabia, that company is worth trillions.

1

t1_izgyuv6 wrote

The three-dimensional bars are terrible. They add nothing to the visualization, and they make the chart harder to read. For example, you can't tell visually that the $18.1B and $17.9B numbers are different, whereas if the bars had flat tops, you could.

The colors also add nothing, since we don't need or have a legend. Color could be better used for a different variable of interest here (like a scale for year of the IPO, or to categorize countries or industries).

It makes no sense to me to have the company name on the bar and the logo above. Put the logos on the bar if you must have them. The company names are also inaccurate: ICBC stands for Industrial and Commercial Bank of China; its name is not "ICBC Bank". NTT should be NTT Docomo. SoftBank is, bizarrely, SoftBank Group Corp. It may seem like nitpicking, but it's worth getting company names right. If that creates a problem with disambiguating organizations with similar names, that problem has to be solved in another way.

The comparison of data across 24 years (1988 - 2022) with no inflation adjustment makes the chart difficult to interpret.

1

t1_izh7d1h wrote

This is missing lots of big tech companies. For example Airbnb IPO'ed for 100B.

1

t1_izhua2m wrote

i remember aramco executives boasting about how aramco was easily top 5 in the world before it went public

1

t1_izfg2pz wrote

Alibaba sells garbage products for cheap prices and uses every last bit of information about you to spam your phone and email. I’m still getting spam calls in Chinese 5 years after trying out their service. Never bought a thing from them.

0