For Barclays Plc’s Kristin Roth DeClark, the Arm Holdings Plc’s initial public offering shows why it’s getting fun to be an investment banker again.
(Bloomberg) — For Barclays Plc’s Kristin Roth DeClark, the Arm Holdings Plc’s initial public offering shows why it’s getting fun to be an investment banker again.
Gone are the days of frenzied investors willing to buy into any company making its public debut, Roth DeClark, Barclays’s global head of technology investment banking, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. Instead, the British bank and its rivals that led the offering have spent months selling potential shareholders on fundamental business metrics.
“This is a really fun time for me personally and for people like me to take companies public,” Roth DeClark said. “We have an investor universe that has to kind of look at everything because there has been such a dearth of IPO activity, but they don’t have to buy everything. It really is a fundamental sale to the investors.”
Arm rose as much as 25% in its trading debut on Thursday after raising $4.87 billion in the year’s biggest initial public offering. The offering comes as online grocery-delivery firm Instacart Inc. is set to price an IPO of its own next week, while footwear maker Birkenstock has also filed to go public.
Read more: Chip Designer Arm’s Debut Gains Deliver Win for Owner SoftBank
Investors in Arm’s IPO included some of British chip designer’s biggest customers. The company set aside more than $700 million of its stock for companies including Intel Corp., Apple Inc. and Nvidia Corp.
Roth DeClark said it next year is poised to be a busy one for the IPO market.
“The bulk of those companies that have been waiting in the backlog will go public next year,” Roth DeClark said, noting April and May could mark an inflection point in the market. “They are gearing up now.”
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