The online platform for rental of tourist apartments Airbnb would be finalizing the documentation of its debut on Wall Street to deliver it to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC, for its acronym in English) throughout the month of August, as published The Wall Street Journal . According to the US newspaper, Morgan Stanley has been the bank chosen to lead the operation, although Goldman Sachs will also participate in this IPO, which will be carried out through a public offering for sale (IPO) before the end of the year.
Airbnb already announced a year ago that it planned to go public in 2020, thus becoming one of the most anticipated stock market premieres of the year. Recently, the vacation rental platform was valued at around $ 18 billion (€ 15.3 billion), well below a previous estimate that put the company's value at about $ 31 billion (€ 26.35 billion).
Last April, with the Covid-19 already affecting international tourism, the CEO and co-founder of the company, Brian Chesky, assured in an interview that the company had been working to present the documentation of its stock market debut in March, but that the impact of Covid-19 in the tourism sector annulled those plans due to the uncertainty generated by the virus and due to the volatility of the markets.
Already in March, Airbnb suspended all its marketing activities to save 800 million dollars throughout this year and reported that its founders will not receive any salary for the next six months, while the top executives will apply a salary cut of the fifty%. Two months later, it announced that it would lay off 1,800 employees, 25% of its workforce. "We do not know exactly when the trips will return and when they return they will be different," Chesky said at the time to justify the 2,000 million dollars that various venture capital funds have injected and the cuts carried out since the outbreak of the pandemic.
However, since the spring, Airbnb has managed to recover relatively quickly since, despite the absence of trips, the platform's clients have maintained reservations of homes close to their habitual residence, reaching the peak of one million nights billed. on July 8 around the world, a figure they had not registered since March 3.
