Tariff Turmoil Freezes the U.S. IPO Market

Dow Jones
04-05

A glimmer of hope that U.S. initial public offerings were about to return is gone.

Ticketing marketplace StubHub and buy-now-pay-later fintech company Klarna are postponing their IPO roadshows, which were set to kick off next week, according to people familiar with the matter. 

Another fintech company, Chime, is pushing off filing its financials publicly with regulators, also delaying its IPO, some of those people said. And virtual physical therapy company Hinge Health is watching the market before its anticipated late-April offering, the people said.

Meanwhile, crypto company Circle Internet Financial had been nearing its next steps in going public, but is now watching anxiously before deciding what to do, some of the people said.

Thursday and Friday’s stock-market swoon slammed the door on companies waiting in the wings to go public. Major U.S. stock indexes are set to post their worst weekly performances in years. U.S. stocks have lost roughly $5 trillion in market cap over the past two days, the largest weekly market cap loss since the pandemic struck in 2020, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

The U.S. IPO market has had a rough go the past three years, but many bankers and lawyers hoped 2025 would be the year listings returned to a more normal pace. Instead, a global trade war is roiling stocks and unnerving investors and executives alike.

“There’s no way on God’s green earth I would recommend any fintech company go public right now, particularly the ones on deck,” said Steve McLaughlin, banker and founder of investment firm Financial Technology Partners. 

McLaughlin said he expects some of the fintech companies that were hoping to go public this year will instead seek to sell themselves. 

Investors who typically buy IPOs instead are focusing on their current portfolio holdings, most of which are in the red. As public competitors’ shares tumble, it makes it tricky to set a price target on companies trying to go public. Executives at private companies are being forced to re-evaluate what their revenues might look like in the coming months. 

Just a week ago, CoreWeave priced its initial public offering below expectations and ended its first day of trading flat. The stock has since increased in value and is now trading above its IPO price.

A hard time getting on the road

StubHub planned to launch its roadshow pitch to investors next week, but the company and its advisers were concerned that investors might not have time to meet with them next week for a roadshow, or that they would be distracted, people familiar with that offering said. 

This isn’t the first time StubHub has delayed its IPO. Over the summer, the company also decided to postpone its offering, given the chilled new-listings market.

Klarna had filed IPO documents earlier this year to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange and has been targeting a valuation of $15 billion. The company was valued at $6.7 billion in 2022.

Shares of one of Klarna’s biggest competitors in the U.S., Affirm, have slumped 46% so far this year, including a 13% swoon Friday. Affirm’s market valuation has slid to just over $12 billion.

Klarna’s backers include a range of big-name investors including Sequoia Capital, Abu Dhabi sovereign-wealth fund Mubadala Investment, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

Chime was valued at about $25 billion in 2021 and has long been considered a likely IPO. Its investors have included SoftBank Group’s Vision Fund 2, General Atlantic, Tiger Global Management and Dragoneer.

Circle, which issues the dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC, had filed confidentially to go public last year. Unlike most cryptocurrencies, whose values fluctuate, so-called stablecoins are intended to be pegged to government-issued currencies.

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