StubHub IPO: Should You Buy In?

One absorbing prospective IPO is StubHub, which filed an S-1 registration signifier precocious and plans to merchantability shares soon connected the New York Stock Exchange nether the banal ticker awesome STUB.

The debut of the world's preeminent secondary summons offering tract offers investors an absorbing campaigner for their portfolios. The communicative includes a laminitis returning to pb a institution from which helium had antecedently been fired (Steve Jobs, anyone?), 30% maturation successful each of the past 2 years, and a caller maturation accidental that absorption is lone opening to cultivate. But is the terms right?

StubHub was co-founded by Stanford MBA pupil Eric Baker successful 2000 with a imaginativeness of becoming the premier online secondary marketplace for tickets to unrecorded events, including sporting events, concerts, and theatre productions. Prior to online marketplaces similar StubHub, secondary marketplace ticket-seekers had to spell done summons scalpers adjacent the venue oregon look up a nonrecreational summons broker. Those options, obviously, were plagued by fraud, usurious markups, and an wide deficiency of transparency that online marketplaces bring.

StubHub recovered immoderate occurrence and built itself into a well-recognized brand, but Baker soon clashed with his co-founder implicit concern strategy. With his co-founder owning a small much banal than helium did and the committee siding with his co-founder, astir 2004, Baker was really fired from the institution helium founded.

After getting fired, Baker went to Europe and founded a competitor, called viagogo, successful 2006, which is fundamentally an planetary mentation of StubHub, arsenic StubHub hadn't truly managed to penetrate Europe yet. Eventually, StubHub sold itself to eBay successful January 2007 for $310 million. While Baker was inactive a shareholder and did pouch tons of wealth from the buyout, helium besides thought StubHub had sold retired excessively soon.

Baker was soon proven close -- oregon astatine least, helium proved himself right. In 2019, Baker's viagogo agreed to bargain StubHub backmost from eBay for a whopping $4.05 billion. Today, StubHub hopes to deed the nationalist markets astatine a importantly higher valuation than that, arsenic I'll sermon soon.

While the acquisition technically closed successful February 2020, the woody past had to spell done the U.K.'s regulatory review, which took 18 months. Of course, this coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, erstwhile some businesses were nether utmost pressure. During that time, StubHub had to laic disconnected a bulk of its unit and abruptly changed its cancellation policy, offering customers 120% credits alternatively of currency refunds to bent onto immoderate currency it had collected.