Skype's listing
convoy drove into the Flower of Lis Manor. When Barron entered the room, he saw Fan Bingbing already standing at the door waiting for him.
"How are you feeling lately, babe."
Barron asked softly, taking her hand and leading her to sit on the sofa.
"It's good. Fortunately, the children are not too noisy..."
Speaking of which, Fan Bingbing has been pregnant for more than seven months, and her due date is more than two months away. Her belly has already grown in size.
As early as several months ago, they already knew that she was pregnant with twins, a boy and a girl - when Fan Bingbing was more than three months pregnant, her belly seemed bigger than that of an average pregnant woman at this stage, so after going to the hospital for a check-up, they knew the result.
It can be said that compared with other mothers, Fan Bingbing's process will be relatively difficult, which also means that in more than two months, Barron will have a son and a daughter.
Barron's gaze stopped on the coffee table in front of the floor-to-ceiling window and he saw a book placed there with a corner of a bookmark sticking out from the middle.
I stood up and walked over, and saw that it was a book about business management.
"Have you been watching this lately? Don't try too hard, baby."
"I just want to learn more. I'm bored most of the time now, so I want to kill time..."
Speaking of which, Fan Bingbing is really hardworking and very smart. After coming to Los Angeles, she was not only able to communicate with others fluently in English very quickly, but also spent most of her time reading books to recharge herself.
It can be said that no one's success comes for nothing.
That night, Barron slept very quietly next to Fan Bingbing.
In fact, he had studied very well with Ivanta the night before, so he came to the place of pregnant Fan Bingbing to have a day's rest.
…
Monday, January 15th.
On this day, Skype officially landed on NASDAQ and began trading.
In this IPO, Skype will issue 30 million American Depositary Receipts (Nasdaq stocks) to the public, which are equivalent to Skype's Class B common stock.
It is also worth mentioning that Skype, like many Internet technology companies, is listed in the form of AB shares, that is, equal shares but different voting rights.
Of the total 200 million shares after the listing, there will be 20 million Class A shares with higher voting weights, which have 10 times the voting rights of Class B common shares.
DS Holdings (Cavendish Trust) owns 16 million Class A shares, while Skype's founding team and O2 Telecom each own 2 million Class A shares.
Due to the enthusiastic atmosphere of investor subscription, Skype's stock offering price was finally $24, higher than the previous pricing range of $21-23.
On the day of listing, Skype's stock opened at $28.5, a direct increase of 18.75% compared to the issue price...
It can be seen that the Nasdaq stock market was indeed a bit fanatical at this time. In the morning, Skype's stock price rose by more than US$30. In the afternoon, it reached the highest price of the first day at US$32.43. Finally, Skype's stock price closed at US$30.16.
Its closing price increased by 25.67% compared with the issue price!
This performance is already very satisfactory.
If calculated based on the closing price of $30.16 that day, Skype's market value exceeded $6 billion, and the 122.5 million Skype shares held by DS Holdings were worth nearly $3.7 billion!
At this time, DS Holdings held 61.25% of Skype's shares and had 70.13% of its voting rights.
In this IPO, of the 30 million shares that Skype sold publicly, accounting for 15%, 20 million were newly issued shares, and Skype received US$480 million in financing.
The other 10 million shares came from the shares sold by DS Holdings and Skype's founding team, who each received $120 million in cash.
After going public, Skype plans to set up a North American branch in Silicon Valley and build a data center here to provide higher quality services to users in this area.
Skype's North American branch is located near Woaw Technology's North American headquarters.
In fact, the good performance of Skype's stock price this time after its listing also benefited from the rapid increase of North American users in the past six months, and the proportion of its paying users is slightly higher than that of their users in other regions.
And their revenue growth curve is also very attractive. In 2005, Skype's annual revenue was only about 60 million US dollars, most of which came from the second half of 2005.
But last year, 2006, Skype's full-year revenue exceeded the initial forecast of $200 million, reaching $220 million, which greatly increased Skype's valuation.
This year, a conservative estimate is that Skype's annual revenue will exceed $300 million!
However, at this time, Baron's focus has shifted from Skype's IPO to the Black Swan Fund.
Since October last year, the Black Swan Fund has gradually stopped its long investments in subprime mortgage-related securities and stocks, and instead began to purchase subprime mortgage credit default swap products, or CDS (Credit Default Swap), in large quantities, starting to prepare for the coming of the subprime mortgage crisis.
In fact, the signs of the subprime mortgage crisis had already begun to appear at the end of last year, but all of this was masked by the carnival in the financial market.
What Barron and his team are waiting for is for the current spark to gradually turn into a raging fire and then reap the richest rewards.
If we look back at this event after the outbreak of the subprime mortgage crisis, everything can be traced back to the outbreak of the subprime mortgage crisis.
In fact, even if the real estate industry was overheated and eventually collapsed, what was destroyed was only this industry. The result was a drop in housing prices, and real estate developers and some people who invested in real estate suffered losses. But at least it would not be as destructive as the subprime mortgage crisis, which could not even affect the global economy.
The reason for such great destructive power can only be blamed on America's strong "financial innovation" capabilities and overly greedy capital.
Not only did they package the loans into various bonds (CDO) and sell them to investors, but they also lowered the terms of the loans and provided home mortgage loans (subprime loans) to people with poor repayment abilities. Through operations, they packaged these subprime mortgage loans into bonds, rated them as excellent, and then sold them.
It can be said that almost all banks and investment banks in the United States are involved in this matter, and even many European and Asian banks are taking over these businesses from American financial institutions.
Investors in these bonds are naturally spread all over the world.
Real Estate - Banks - Investors...
Not only that, insurance companies are also involved, that is, CDS, which is equivalent to the insurance purchased by investment institutions for these subprime loan bonds - they pay a part of the money (insurance premium) to the insurance company, and if the home buyer is unable to repay the loan normally and causes losses, the insurance company will pay compensation.
Because housing prices continue to rise, even if someone cannot repay their loans, the bank will not lose money if they sell the mortgaged properties. Therefore, insurance companies are actively involved in this "extremely low-risk" way of earning insurance money.
In this way, the amount of funds involved in real estate mortgage loans was magnified hundreds or thousands of times through the amplifier of financial instruments, and finally formed a huge balloon that enveloped the entire world.