In an interview with the CheckPoints, CEO of "Shift", a Georgian-born American businessman, George Arison announced that the company is now a public company, trading on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SFT.
According to him, there are many things about SPACs that are useful, specifically that they're a lot faster than a traditional IPO and that one can do them in a few months rather than nine months in case of IPO. He also highlighted that one could raise more capital than in a traditional way. "Normally in the case of a traditional IPO, one can raise only about 10 to 15 percent of company's market cap," - he says.
"Thirdly, this option allows you to talk about your long term story. Because it's a merger, there's no prohibition to talk about the long-term, which is the case in regular IPO because you normally don't talk about the long term. You only talk about past performance. For a business like ours, which is only six years old and a little bit longer than six and a half years old, having the ability to talk about the long term was beneficial.
And obviously, it's a very capital intensive business. So raising more capital was very useful as well. Plus, in this environment, with covid around us all the time, getting this done fast was really important. Had we started a normal IPO process in April or May, we wouldn't have finished by now. We would have probably been going public in January. And who knows what the market conditions would be like in January? With this, we could have moved a lot faster, which was obviously beneficial. The market environment also matters. You could have a great company, but you can't go public if the environment is terrible. Therefore, getting it done while the market was doing really well was important," - he said.
And obviously, it's a very capital intensive business. So raising more capital was very useful as well. Plus, in this environment, with covid around us all the time, getting this done fast was really important. Had we started a normal IPO process in April or May, we wouldn't have finished by now. We would have probably been going public in January. And who knows what the market conditions would be like in January? With this, we could have moved a lot faster, which was obviously beneficial. The market environment also matters. You could have a great company, but you can't go public if the environment is terrible. Therefore, getting it done while the market was doing really well was important," - he said.
