Thursday 19 September 2019

San Fransisco Business Times/Katie Burke: Airbnb to go public in 2020


Airbnb to go public in 2020

By
Staff Reporter, San Francisco Business Times
Airbnb has made it official: the San Francisco-based travel giant will be taking the company public in 2020.
Airbnb released a statement on its plan today, but did not provide any details about how or when it intends to launch the company on the public markets. The home-rentals giant has been widely expected to pursue a direct listing.
It has been laying the groundwork for an initial public offering for nearly two years, and was initially expected to go public in the second half of this year alongside other Bay Area tech giants such as Uber (NYSE: UBER), Lyft (NASDAQ: LYFT) and Pinterest (NYSE: PINS). The company said this week that it took in "substantially more" than $1 billion of revenue in 2019.
The company's valuation, share price or intentions for the capital it raises were not immediately available.
Airbnb has been on a fast track to growth since its founding in 2008. The company now has more than 7 million listings spread among more than 100,000 cities on its site, and continues to stretch into luxury travel, business travel, boutique hotel, experiences among other segments of the travel industry.
Its host and guest network has generated more than $100 billion in estimated direct economic impact across 30 countries in 2018, a figure the company expects to increase moving forward.
Just last month, the company said the number of rooms it had on its platform had grown to eclipse all the rooms operated by the top seven hotel chains combined, a figure that helped boost the home-sharing giant to a record-breaking number of stays. It reported more than 4 million guest check-ins in August, the highest in the company's 11-year history.
In an interview with the San Francisco Business Times late last year, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said he envisions Airbnb as an anywhere, everything company.
"We expanded the scope of what Airbnb can become, almost like increasing the canvas size," he said of pushes into the corporate, luxury, traditional hotel, experience and travel markets. "We massively increased our leadership capabilities and massively increased the categories of offerings so that ... Airbnb can become a much, much larger idea."
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