Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman said his fund Pershing Square was pulling its planned US IPO. The fund was due to list on the NYSE. This IPO was a big deal, with a massive $25bn target originally, which would have made it the all-time biggest IPO on the NYSE.
Pershing Square said it would still contemplate a listing at future date. The decision was taken after numerous meetings with investors, the firm said.
The Financial Times called the ambitious IPO “a bid for immortality,” and it was entirely characteristic of Ackman himself, a fund manager I used to cover regularly at The Hedge Fund Journal. He wanted the investment vehicle to trade at a premium to its NAV and was planning to mobilise an army of followers on Twitter / X to help it do so.
The IPO was looking at north of a billion dollars in retail investor demand alone. It was eventually downsized to a modest $2bn target raise before being scrapped.
The raise was hampered from the start with some frankly schoolboy errors, like admitting that institutional demand for the IPO was weak, in contrast to retail investor appetite. Ackman finally told his followers that he had “a better transaction structure” than that originally envisaged. Note that Pershing Square already has a listed fund in London [LON:PSH].
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AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems files for IPO in US
AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems has filed for a US IPO, taking advantage of the investor massive interest in the AI market. The company started up eight years ago. Brokers in New York reckon the IPO will be a good test of prevailing investor appetite for AI stocks.
Cerebras is competing against trillion dollar wunderkind Nvidia NASDAQ:NVDA which has been the darling of literally millions of tech investors. Cerebras is already being backed by some serious heavyweights, like the Abu Dhabi Growth Fund and Coatue Management.
Cerebas is known for its CS-2 chip system which is run off the company’s proprietary Wafer-Scale Engine. It launched the latest version of its wafer-sized semi-conductor in March of this year. Cerebras last went to the market for private money in 2021 when it raised a punchy $250m from a partnership led by Alpha Wave Ventures, with Falcon and Chimera also on board.
China’s Honor planning multi-billion A-share IPO
Chinese smart phone maker Honor is prepping for a listing on China’s A-share market, according to documents filed in Shenzhen. The company, which was carved out of Huawei in 2020, is being strongly backed by local government investors plus expects to also receive tax breaks and further R&D funding to power its future.
According to media reports in China, the Shenzhen government is a shareholder and an IPO would help it to exit from some or all of its Honor position. This is a potentially very large IPO. Honor was valued at $13mn when it was acquired from Huawei during the pandemic.
In terms of timescale, Honor is expecting to list in the next 12 months, although details are scarce right now. The company still has to conduct some “shareholding reform” before it eventually hits the China A-shares market.
