The We Company, the group behind flexible workspace giant WeWork, has launched its long-awaited initial public offering.
The listing, for which a date has not yet been set, will be a crucial test for investors’ appetite for the fast-growing co-working sector.
In a prospectus filed on 14 August, the company said revenues during the first half of this year stood at $1.5bn, up from $763.7m during the same period of 2018. The pre-tax loss over those six months stood at just shy of $900m.
The latest full-year figures showed a pre-tax loss of almost $2bn in 2018 on revenues of $1.8bn. The We Company said financial figures in the prospectus were based on statements from WeWork Companies Inc, its “predecessor… for financial reporting purposes”.
The We Company confirmed in the prospectus that is has entered into a commitment for a senior secured debt facility with an array of banks worth $6bn, which it expects to close at the same time as the listing.
WeWork – which remains the brand for The We Company’s workspace division – has grown rapidly since its launch in 2010, building a business centred on buying or taking long leases on buildings, refurbishing them and then offering them to tenants – or “members” on shorter, more flexible leases that other landlords.
Today, the company operates in 111 cities across 29 countries, according to the IPO prospectus, with some 527,000 members. More than half of its customers are based outside of the US, the company said.
As is standard for companies looking to list, The We Company mapped out various risk factors to its business in the IPO documents, including that its “rapid growth may not be sustainable” and that its history of losses means that it “may be unable to achieve profitability at a company level… for the foreseeable future”.
Underwriting for the deal is being handled by a who’s who of big US and European investment banks, including JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, HSBC, UBS and Wells Fargo.
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