• General
  • November 16, 2020
  • 4 minutes read

Airbnb Files To Go Public

Brian Chesky, Founder and CEO, Airbnb After long periods of speculation and anticipation, Airbnb, the online rentals marketplace, has formally…

Brian Chesky, Founder and CEO, Airbnb


After long periods of speculation and anticipation, Airbnb, the online rentals marketplace, has formally submitted a public filing for an initial public offering (IPO) with the U.S. Securities and Exchanges Commission. Airbnb is looking to go public 12 years after its founding and with $6.4 billion in equity and debt funding raised over the years as a private company. Particularly, Airbnb is said to be targeting an IPO before the year runs out.

Airbnb’s S-1 filing shows $4.8 billion in 2019 revenue and a net loss of $674 million in the same year. In the year before that, the company had $3.65 billion in revenue and a net loss of only $16.9 million.

In the first nine months of this year, however, Airbnb saw its revenue go down by a wide margin as the early months of the coronavirus pandemic brought about global travel restrictions that widely affected its business. The company posted $2.5 billion in revenue in the nine months leading up to September, compared to $3.7 billion in the same period of the previous year. The company’s losses also more than doubled within that period from $323 million to $697 million.

As of the end of September this year, Airbnb reported having $4.5 billion in available cash and marketable securities on its balance sheet. A significant part of that amount comes from the $2 billion in fresh debt and equity funding that the company raised in April this year when the coronavirus pandemic largely affected its business. The funding came from a group of private equity firms including Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners.

Notably, Airbnb actually turned a profit in its most recent quarter, reporting $219 million in net income on revenues of $1.34 billion. It comes after the company laid off one-quarter of its workforce in May this year.

Airbnb intends to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “ABNB”. The company’s public offering is being managed by a party of investment banks including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Citigroup, Jefferies, and Allen & Company. 




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