Japan’s Rakuten Group has hired Goldman Sachs and Daiwa Securities to oversee an initial public offering (IPO) for its banking division.
That’s according to a Bloomberg News report on Wednesday (September 21), citing sources familiar with the matter.
The sources say Rakuten — whose businesses include e-commerce, messaging, grocery delivery and a variety of FinTech services — plans to list its banking operations on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, which is valued at about 300 billion yen ($2.1 billion). ) to 400 billion yen in a year to list IPO as early as December.
Goldman Sachs declined to comment Wednesday; Rakuten and Daiwa were not immediately available for comment.
The Bloomberg report noted that the IPO is part of the company’s effort to expand its financial services operations as its mobile unit struggles and it faces stiff competition from Amazon in Japan’s e-commerce market.
“It makes sense that Rakuten is raising money to support the continued growth of the banking unit – the combination of e-commerce business and FinTech makes the company a strong, attractive player in Japan,” said Kazunori Ito, an analyst at Morningstar. to Bloomberg.
The planned IPO comes amid a prolonged drought for tech IPOs in the US, PYMNTS recently reported.
Wednesday marks the 238th day without a $50 million+ tech IPO, beating records set after the 2008 financial crisis and dot.com’s early bankruptcy.
Learn more: 8-month US tech IPO drought is the longest this century
High inflation has prompted the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, dampening enthusiasm for growth stocks that had surged during last year’s boom.
And while tech startups have been hit the hardest, it’s not just tech. Total U.S. IPO volume is down 94% year over year, with just $7 billion raised earlier this week, compared to $110 billion at this point last year.
In April, Rakuten Group started a collaboration with Uber Eats in Japan to offer users another online payment option.
Read more: Rakuten teams with Uber eat Japan for digital payments
Rakuten Pay, the Rakuten Group’s online payment company, processes payments through the credit card linked to the Rakuten ID system. It also allows users to earn Rakuten points when ordering through Uber Eats and pay for orders with those earned points.
New PYMNTS study: How consumers are using digital banks
A PYMNTS survey of 2,124 US consumers shows that while two-thirds of consumers have used FinTechs for some aspect of banking services, only 9.3% cite them as their primary bank.
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https://www.pymnts.com/smbs/2022/goldman-sachs-is-showing-the-ropes-to-small-businesses/partial/
See more in: Banking, Connected Economy, Daiwa, Digital First Banking, Ecommerce, FinTech, Goldman Sachs, IPO, IPO, Japan, News, Rakuten, Retail, What’s Hot
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