Taking a step towards completing an Initial Public Offering (IPO) remotely, European company Pexip announced virtual roadshows on Monday. This further stresses the need for video conferencing owing to the outbreak of the pandemic COVID-19. Pexip says that its being used by the US military and also the German Government.
The COVID-19 scenario has been crippling economic markets, and also has been bringing forth logistics hurdles of conducting a deal remotely during lockdowns in most of the world, where people have been mostly deterred to launch IPOs. Yet, this is a rare example of a company that has gone ahead with a listing during the crisis. Reports state that as of now, Pexip intends to sell 17 million news shares at the same time, that has taken the total to be raised in the IPO to NOK 2.142 billion.
It’s well known that IPOs involve a lot of analysis, analysts, bankers, and company executives to be prepared in face to face meetings with investors. Reuters reported that Pexip initially has some pushback about completing the deal on video, yet regarding IPOs it is a super-efficient way to do things. The CEO stated that he was a little deterred by the market volatility, but gradually it was pacified.
Pexip says that it is itself more sure than its rivals, as it allows users to store the data on a ‘self-host’ basis on their own private cloud or data center. Reports state that there have been funds advised by Capital Research and Management Company, Wasatch Global Investors, DNB Asset Management and TIN Fonder have committed to subscribe NOK 1 billion of shares in the IPO.
However, participants in the market are keeping a close eye on key proceedings and are trying to glean what the deal might mean for other potential users. At a time when IPOs have been drying up, equity capital markets (ECM) bankers are focussing on running secondary trades for companies that are looking to raise funds to get through a global recession.
About rival Zoom, reports state that Google had once explored acquiring video meet app Zoom. According to IANS, the internal discussions didn’t really get very far. However, Zoom was among one of the several companies that Google’s engineers had evaluated. However, what’s to be seen at this point is that privacy has to be secured, and video conferencing apps should leave no stone unturned to achieve that.