Abstract:
In 2001, Nasdaq chairman hinted that the company might go public, that is would issue an IPO. Nasdaq'a bad performance damaged the US IPO market in that year. In this paper we will discuss these.
In 2001, the market for Initial Public Offer got damaged due to Nasdaq's year-long suppression. It was looking very obvious that Nasdaq would go for public issue, that is, Nasdaq was getting closer to an Initial Public Offer (IPO).
The Nasdaq Stock Market had been looking for an IPO for the last five or six years. Meanwhile, Hellman & Friedman, a private equity firm of San Francisco, invested 240 million dollars in the Nasdaq Stock Market through debentures which could be converted into common stock at any moment during the coming 5 years. This was a short step by Nasdaq to go to the public.
Basically Nasdaq was a membership based, quasi-government company held by a private body. It wanted to be a public enterprise through its investments.
Nasdaq owned a major stake in Easdaq that had been struggling in stock market of Brussels for almost five years.
The capital structure of Nasdaq had been renovated to attract the institutional as well as the individual investors. Nasdaq took several initiatives to increase the market liquidity and make the process of order execution easy. According to the chairman of Nasdaq, those were all meant for pulling Nasdaq IPO.