Nasdaq takes prize Airbnb booking

Airbnb has chosen to list its shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market, a win for the exchange after losing high-profile listings such as Uber Technologies to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) for years.

The home-rental company did not disclose further details of its listing plans in a one-sentence statement this week.

Nasdaq has a reputation for tech-focused stocks such as software and biotechnology, including high-profile initial public offerings such as those for Lyft and Zoom Video Communications.

Yet it has frequently lost the competition for mega initial public offerings (IPOs) to the NYSE, including Uber’s $8.1bn (R132bn) listing last year and Snowflake’s $3.86bn offering including so-called greenshoe shares in September.

Airbnb said in August that it had filed confidentially with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO. It will seek to raise as much as $3bn in the IPO before the end of the year, people familiar with the matter have said.

At that price, Airbnb’s offering would be the third-biggest on Nasdaq, topped only by Facebook’s $16bn IPO in 2012 and Mondelez International’s $8.68bn listing in 2001.

By comparison, the NYSE has been the venue for at least 23 IPOs exceeding $3bn.

Airbnb was valued at $18bn in April when it raised $2bn in debt from investors at the depths of the pandemic. That was a significant drop from its earlier peak valuation of $31bn in a 2017 fundraising round.

San Francisco-based Airbnb told shareholders in an e-mail it was splitting its privately held shares this week, a move that would lower its stock price per share, signalling that it is nearing a public offering,

Airbnb bounced back from the pandemic more quickly than it expected, as people sought long-term, rural rentals to escape Covid hotspots and take advantage of workfrom-home opportunities.

The company began seeing signs of recovery in June, with bookings down only 30% from the same month in 2019. That compared with a 70% decline in May from a year earlier.