This week: Nubank raises massive amounts in IPO. How Bolsonaro won Time’s Person of the Year poll. Free internet for students. And the latest on the Health Ministry hack.
Nubank IPO deemed a success
The initial public offering of Brazilian digital bank Nubank exceeded expectations and pushed the company’s valuation to over USD 52 million. Share prices closed their first day of trading on the New York stock exchange up 14.56 percent.
Why it matters. Nubank not only became the most valuable financial institution in Latin America, but also the sixth-most valuable company in the region.
- The fintech is only behind Brazilian giants Petrobras (USD 71.3 billion) and Vale (USD 66.7 billion), Mexican telecom firm América Móvil (USD 61.4 billion), Argentinian e-commerce behemoth Mercado Libre (USD 61.08 billion), and Walmart’s Mexico-Central America division (USD 61.06 billion).
Stocks. About half of the available shares were quickly snatched by major investors such as Tiger, Sequoia, SoftBank, Baillie Gifford, and Dragoneer.
- Berkshire Hathaway, which had already poured USD 500 million in Nubank in June, bought nearly 10 percent of available shares.
- There was little space left for Brazilian institutional investors, as 7.5 million clients received free share receipts and another 815,000 retail investors also got in.
Made in Brazil, listed in NY. For Alex Ibrahim, head of international markets at the New York stock exchange, Brazil is a strong market for technology — but local tech companies will increasingly prefer listing their shares in other countries.
Yes, but … The result of Nubank’s first day on the stock exchange got mixed reactions among analysts, with some questioning if Nubank has been over-valued.
- Although Nubank has 48 million clients, many of them are still not fully monetized. This is made clear, for example, with the fact that the company — created in 2013 — only saw its first profits in H1 2021.
- The performance of Brazilian fintech shares on the global stock market has been bumpy. Share prices of payment companies Stone and PagSeguro have dropped 78...
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