Lyft To List On Nasdaq, File IPO Next Week

Ride-hailing company Lyft is preparing to list shares on Nasdaq at the end of March, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

At the end of last year, the company submitted paperwork for an initial public offering to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and it’s expected to make the actual IPO filing next week, naming Nasdaq as the listing exchange.

The company will then launch a roadshow pitch to potential investors in mid-March, and is expected to price shares later that month.

The Nasdaq listing is significant because Nasdaq competes with the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to snag important and notable technology companies, and it wants to be the exchange that gets the best ones.

The NYSE listed a few marquee companies in 2017, including Spotify and Snap. Analysts expect many more high profile companies to go public in 2019.

Although the recent government shutdown affected the SEC’s ability to process and approve listings, Lyft’s speed shows that the shutdown might not have had as big an effect on the new-issue market as some had feared.

In January, it was revealed that Uber, which is also planning to go public this year, was probably going to have a valuation about $14 billion less than what was originally thought.

Uber is expected to go public in the first half of 2019, having filed paperwork with the SEC in the U.S. at the end of December.

According to The Information, it is believed that when the ride-hailing company goes public this year, it will have a valuation of a little less than $90 billion. That number is partially based on previous undisclosed projections that the company handed over to creditors last year, which revealed estimated double net revenue would reach $14.2 billion by 2019. It also said Uber’s loss before interest, taxes and non-cash items would fall to $500 million in 2019 from a projected $1.7 billion in 2018.