The retailer is hoping to use funds raised on the markets to take advantage of increased spending by Russia’s middle class, the FT reports. The owners of the grocer, including US private equity fund TPG and Moscow-based VTB capital, plan to offer global depositary receipts on the LSE no earlier than next year. “Lenta plans to hold an IPO in the coming years. But it will definitely not happen this year”, daily Vedomosti quotes sources close to the matter. Lenta is one of top 10 Russia’s retailers. It has 5mn customers and 20,000 employees. The firm operates 56 hypermarkets across the country and plans to open 18 stores annually. The grocer’s revenue increased 22, 4% in 2012, the profit rose five-fold to nearly $200mn. Established in 1993 Lenta is currently controlled by TPG, VTB and EBRD. Lenta was once an acquisition target for Wal-Mart. The last Russian IPO in London was Megafon’s $1.8bn listing in November 2012. The telecoms offering was the largest London listing last year. The last Russian retail IPO on LSE was O’Key raising $419.5mn in 2010. Lenta’s public offering would show private equity funds reviving plans to list companies they own, amid recovering equity markets and lower volatility, the FT reports. Six private equity-backed IPOs have been placed in Europe so far this year, compared with only five for the whole of last year, according to Reuters. … Read More
‘Checking in’ on Foursquare’s $41mn financial injection
Foursquare is a privately held company with an estimated vaule of $600 million. Dennis Crowley, co-founder and CEO of Foursquare secured the $41 million to revitalize the company. The majority of the financing comes from private equity fund Silver Lake Partners as convertible debt. By taking on debt, instead of giving investors shares, the company has taken on a huge risk, as well as created doubt about its actual net worth.Crowley doesn’t seem worried about how the funds were acquired, but rather happy they came through.“The thing that’s important is — hey, we just raised $41 million to do the things we want to do. That’s the thing that we’re psyched about,” he announced on the official company blog Thursday.An unconventional business modelLast year the company’s revenue coming mostly from advertising was around $2 billion. For many analysts it is disappointingly small and some tech blogs have even predicted this slow advertising approach will be the company’s downfall.On March 17, venture capitalist and Yelp board member Keith Rabois tweeted that Foursquare’s only hope was a buyout.After the news went public, Crowley told BusinessWeek that his company is “closer to being able to prove that there’s a real business here.”As of January 2013, the company had 30 million users, which still dwarfs in comparison to social networking giants Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.“This will be a very important public company one day,” Bijan Sabet, a general partner at Spark Capital told Bloomberg.The data potentialFoursqaure will use the $41 million to tap into the company’s real potential- its database. Crowley says that 1.3 businesses already use Foursqaure.Introduced in 2009, Foursquare was the first mobile app check-in service, and since, many companies have forgone developing their own app, have simply added Foursquare to their user platform. This means location data from social media outlets like Instagram and Twitter are feeding into Foursquare data. Presently more than 40,000 applications operate a Foursquare platform.This data is valuable because it can provide advertisers with customers’ location.If a person ‘checks in’ at an amusement park, Foursquare can send them a coupon for cotton candy. If a person checks in at Starbucks, an advert for a neighboring bagel shop can pop up.Mobile advertisers will pay top dollar to know a customer’s precise location. … Read More
Is universal pre-school worth taxpayers’ dollars?
You will recall that in his last State of the Union address, President Obama announced a policy idea that makes a whole lot of sense for our times: universal pre-school. It’s easy to describe why this is a good idea, and I’ll do so in a moment, but in recent debates, I’ve noticed some opposition talking points creeping in that—surprise—don’t have much at all to do with what the White House appears to be proposing. So let’s clarify a few things and raise a very big question that will shortly be answered (how to pay for it).Why do this? Easy: because so much research shows how important it is, especially for kids from less-advantaged households, to get the cognitive boost that quality early-learning programs provide. For a readable review of a broad literature in support of that claim, see here. But I can assure you that experts from left, right, and middle agree on this.Continue Reading… … Read More
2 Rivals Complicate Deal for Dell
The private equity giant Blackstone Group and the investor Carl C. Icahn have each separately submitted preliminary takeover proposal for Dell, the embattled computer maker. … Read More
Blackstone Studying Dell, but Said to Be Unlikely to Bid
Rivals to the proposed $24 billion buyout of the computer maker by its founder, Michael S. Dell, and the private equity firm Silver Lake have until midnight Friday to submit their alternative bids under a process being run by a special committee of the Dell board. … Read More
Do feminists care if you take your husband’s name?
Of all the battleground issues for feminism – reproductive freedom, pay equity, institutionalized violence and rape culture – how significant is that most intimate and unique one: our last names? Or, as Jill Filipovic, wearing her admitted “cranky feminist” hat asked in the Guardian Thursday, “Why, in 2013, does getting married mean giving up the most basic marker of your identity?”The statistics tell the story. Even after generations of women have had the opportunity to keep their birth names after tying the knot, the vast majority — roughly 90 percent – still prefers to adopt their husbands’. Fewer women retain their names now than they did in the 1990s. A 2009 Indiana University study found that over 70 percent of Americans believe a woman should change her name when she gets married, and roughly half think it should be legally required. When the study came out, IU professor Brian Powell noted, “If names are a core aspect of our identity, this is important.” And a Pennsylvania State study last year found that the rate of respondents who agreed that “a woman keeping her name was less committed to her marriage” had leapt from 2.7 percent to over 10 percent in a 15-year span.Continue Reading… … Read More
Swedish crowdfunders turn ‘likes’ into equity
A Swedish website is helping start-ups tap their social media networks to find man-on-the-street equity investors, and in some cases dispel the scepticism of traditional bankrollers, The Local’s Ann Törnkvist discovers. … Read More
