Lending is easy, one old banking adage states. It’s getting the money back that’s hard. Klarna, the Swedish buy now, pay later firm aiming for a U.S. market debut, wants to convince customers and investors that it has discovered a smoother alternative. But while Klarna would like to present itself as closer to Google than Goldman Sachs, conventional metrics suggest it is far from disrupting the laws of lending. Like other BNPL providers, Klarna specializes in short-term loans borrowers can pay back in instalments and often without interest. The initial public offering prospectus touts a loan loss rate of 0.47%

Fewer blank checks are being written on Wall Street, but bankers are still happily cashing them. Even amid sluggish deal markets, money managers keep tinkering with special-purpose acquisition companies, ensuring a steady drip of activity. Buyout shops have good reasons, however, to help them really revive the sullied model. Taking shell companies public on the promise of finding takeover targets peaked in 2021, when nearly 700 of them raised more than $165 billion, according to LSEG data. The frenzied hype broke in large part after higher interest rates curbed risk appetites for speculative ventures and U.S. securities regulators blocked wild-eyed projections associated with SPAC

Stripe develops software to facilitate payments, but its financial backers are struggling to receive theirs. Started by John and Patrick Collison in 2009, the financial technology company has given no sign of going public soon, making it hard for venture capitalists to cash out. Enter Sequoia Capital with a plan that will buy some time, but one which if applied too often would distort the investment model. Most successful 15-year-old startups already have been bought by a bigger rival or proceeded with an initial public offering. Stripe hasn’t. To appease limited partners itchy to exit funds from 2009 to 2012,

High-end cruise line Viking is riding a grey wave. The California-based firm has filed to go public in New York, at a potential price of $10.8 billion, higher in relative valuation terms than its much larger peers Carnival and Royal Caribbean. In its favor is a reliance on older, richer customers. That is fuel for rapid growth, though investors will be subject to the whims of the fortunate few, in more ways than one. Viking is not shy about targeting a fairly narrow demographic for its fleet of nearly 100 boats. CEO Torstein Hagen, who also founded the company almost three decades

For a sign of how the internet has changed the way consumers shop for clothes, consider the “Shein haul.” It’s a social media happening where customers of the eponymous retail app shake out a big box of low-priced goods and sift through the contents. Some items are keepers; some are not. The element of surprise is arguably a thrill for fashionistas. For investors trying to work out whether Shein is worth around $50 billion or potentially quadruple that, the uncertainty is less welcome. The Singapore-based company is itself a kind of surprise. It came from nearly nowhere to capture a sizeable share

Buyout firms have an even bigger problem than finding a place to park fleets of armored cars heaving with cash: what to do about their idling truckloads of portfolio companies. The two main avenues for returning money to increasingly itchy investors are largely blocked. To get around them, the existing owners are going down the road of cashing out backers while keeping assets. The problem is that more traffic will make this route riskier. Clearing the backlog is a gargantuan task. More than $3 trillion of unsold investments are sitting inside private equity firms, according to a report issued this week by

If any company knows how to rebound from an ugly brick shot, it should be one in the basketball business. Amer Sports badly missed on the pricing of its initial public offering, despite having an all-star roster of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley on its team as underwriters. The owner of the Wilson, Salomon and Arc’teryx brands sold shares at just $13 apiece, below a marketed range of $16 to $18, valuing it at about $6 billion. Fears about its dependence on China are overblown, however, and make the investment a slam dunk. Amer has upped its game since the

The initial public offering trail for Amer Sports warrants a black-diamond rating. The maker of Salomon skis and Arc’teryx parkas is sounding out new investors after a group led by Anta Sports Products bought it for about $5 billion in September 2019. Impressive growth in China should give the valuation a lift, but chunky debt and the Wilson brand slightly weaken the company’s competitive edge. Amer has been on a tear. Its backers, which include Lululemon Athletica founder Chip Wilson and Asian buyout shop FountainVest, oversaw a 61% increase in adjusted EBITDA during the first nine months of 2023 from a year earlier, on the back

Between a still-choppy market for stock-market listings and a dealmaking slump, buyout shops have few easy options to offload their investments. Waystar, whose backers include Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and EQT, is trying its luck with the initial public offering route. Last valued at $2.7 billion, the healthcare payments company is now eyeing a debut at nearly three times that figure, according to Reuters. With its deal-heavy growth strategy crimped by high interest rates, it’s likely the company’s best option, but the valuation looks aggressive. Waystar provides software to handle billing and payments for healthcare providers, some three-fourths of whom still manage those functions in-house,

The semiconductor industry has changed immeasurably since Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group bought Arm for $32 billion in 2016. Yet the British chip designer’s fair value may be in that same ballpark, according to a Breakingviews valuation. SoftBank said on Tuesday it was seeking an equity value of $50 billion to $54 billion as part of the roadshow for Arm’s initial public offering, factoring in shares issued to employees that are yet to vest. When the Japanese conglomerate’s boss Masayoshi Son scooped up the Cambridge-based company seven years ago, he was placing a bet on the so-called Internet of Things, the view that

TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew is in a tough spot. The chief executive of the social media app owned by China’s ByteDance is trying to persuade U.S. officials that it will protect American users’ data. But even if proposed fixes get past federal officials – no sure thing – it still must contend with activist state leaders. The company’s best defense is to add some transparency through an initial public offering. TikTok’s addictive short-form videos have made its app wildly popular with users and advertisers. They have also attracted scrutiny of its ownership. Though several American investors including KKR and Tiger

Private equity dealmaking is getting a little too incestuous. Volatile markets and the $3 trillion industry’s sheer size mean that Blackstone, KKR and others will increasingly have to sell assets to each other – and even themselves. The merry-go-round can create governance concerns and extra costs. The way buyout barons structure their funds typically encourages them to start offloading portfolio companies after around five years. Two of their favourite exit routes – selling to big companies and initial public offerings – are tricky given dicey markets. Buyout-backed IPOs declined 94% so far this year, Refinitiv data shows. That’s one reason