Is the IPO Market Warming up to Genomics?
By Tony Fong
NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – After years of being non-existent, recent activity suggests that the IPO market may be opening up to the sequencing space. But whether that will extend to the broader –omics market is debatable.
... "What happens is that banks, investors, boards look at other companies' successes and failures and use it to benchmark their own decisions," said Gil Bashe, a limited partner in private equity firm GTCR Golder Rauner and executive vice president at PR firm Makovsky + Co. ...
Hope Beyond Sequencing?
The Complete Genomics and PacBio filings may cause others in the –omics space to at least consider their own prospects of an IPO, according to Bashe. If there is the perception that the capital markets are opening up, companies will reason that they should go after the money, "and get [their] stories in there," he said. ...
... "It does attract people saying, 'We can buy it now less expensively or we can wait until [they go public] and it will be more expensive,'" Bashe said.
In fact, while filing and maintaining an IPO is expensive — about $1 million per year when fees paid to lawyers, banks, accountants and other costs are tallied — the IPO route has become a strategy to bring aboard private investors. A decade ago, Bashe said, when a company went public, the "great bulk" of its stock was purchased by company outsiders. Now, the purchasers are often insiders. ...
... Bashe said that he has seen many companies go "through the motions of filing an S-1" to attract attention and then get acquired without ever going public, Bashe added. ...
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