San Francisco (AFP)
The peer-to-peer rental platform Airbnb officially launched its IPO process on Wednesday, after months of rumors and uncertainty for the company hard hit by the pandemic that was expected on Wall Street since last year.
Airbnb filed a confidential file on Wednesday with the gendarme of the US Stock Exchange, the SEC, the start of a long induction process.
The Californian group did not disclose financial information or specify how many titles would be put on the market.
He officially announced last September of his intention to go public in 2020. But he had to put his plans on hold due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which devastated the tourism and travel sector in the spring .
"We are collectively going through the most painful crisis of our lives," said Brian Chesky, co-founder of the company, in May, when he had to announce the layoff of about 25% of its 7,500 employees worldwide.
Airbnb then admitted that in 2020 it would post a turnover "less than half" of that of 2019.
In April, in the midst of the slump due to numerous cancellations and the tourism crisis linked to the health crisis, the San Francisco company had raised $ 1 billion from investment funds.
It was then worth $ 18 billion, according to the American economic channel CNBC, well below the 35 billion estimated before the pandemic.
In June, Airbnb regained hope thanks to the resumption of short stays and close to home. "Our data shows that the sector is starting to rebound," the platform assured.
- More unicorns -
This announcement comes the day Apple exceeds $ 2,000 billion in stock market valuation, a sign of the vitality of groups in Silicon Valley despite the recession.
It also marks the entry "into the big leagues" of another company belonging to the "gig economy", or sharing economy, born at the turn of the 2010s and which has revolutionized several sectors of activity around the world.
Airbnb has opted for a so-called "confidential" procedure, allowed since 2012 by an American law and extended in 2017 to large companies by the SEC.
It aims to promote IPOs without having to publicly reveal certain financial information, at least not until an advanced stage.
It also allows for more gentle exposure to the markets, which have proven to be formidable for other unicorns (unlisted companies valued at more than a billion) of the economy to the task.
Uber, for example, struggled to attract investors in the spring of 2019. On the WeWork side, the operation launched in the fall ended in a fiasco. The American shared office rental giant had to postpone its Nasdaq listing and its boss Adam Neumann was ousted.
- Inflatable mattresses -
Airbnb was founded by Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, who began by renting inflatable mattresses in their apartment for a convention in San Francisco in late 2007.
It then took them nearly two years to create the platform under its current name and raise, after having suffered numerous refusals, $ 600,000 from an investment fund.
In 2011 their company, which claims a presence in 89 countries and more than a million overnight bookings, joined the unicorn club.
It has since grown dramatically despite the many obstacles.
Airbnb is notably facing a rebellion from municipalities (Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, etc.) and hoteliers, who are worried about seeing private accommodation de facto transforming into hotels, depriving residents of accommodation, promoting real estate speculation and creating a shortfall for the traditional hotel sector.
And above all, more recently, the pandemic has raised doubts about the viability of the group's model.
But according to Arun Sundararajan, professor at New York University and researcher on the sharing economy, the future might not be so bleak for the platform, which has been able to build a relationship of trust with its users. In particular, it introduced new health rules.
"As people resume travel, they will move towards spaces over which they will feel they have control," he told AFP last May.
"They won't want to walk through crowded hotel receptions."
© 2020 AFP