Customers at some of the largest retail brokerage firms in the US each received at least a single share in SpaceX’s US$86.2 billion (S$110 billion) initial public offering (IPO), underscoring how the offering was designed to give individual investors a sizeable role.
All eligible customers putting in requests for shares with platforms run by Robinhood, Charles Schwab, Fidelity Investments and SoFi Technologies were allocated some stock, according to the firms’ respective representatives.
SpaceX ended up allocating about 20 per cent of its IPO to retail investors globally, Bloomberg News reported. Demand for the shares ran to more than US$100 billion, people familiar with the matter have said, leaving many who sought larger allocations with less than they hoped. The shares closed their second day of trading on June 15 up 43 per cent from their US$135 price in the IPO, giving SpaceX a market value of US$2.5 trillion.
Robinhood disclosed on its app on June 15 that 855,424 of its customers requested shares at the IPO price via its IPO Access platform and it filled the same number of requests. The firm did not disclose to what extent its customers’ allocations fell short of their requested amounts.
All Robinhood users that applied for SpaceX shares received at least one share, a spokesperson for the firm said. The company had 27.7 million funded accounts as of the end of May.
In South Korea, Mirae Asset Securities did not receive an allocation for its clients despite being an underwriter of the IPO. By contrast, Japanese investors bought 16.3 million shares in aggregate for US$2.2 billion.
In the UK, retail buyers received about US$364 million worth of shares after submitting orders worth nearly US$1 billion, Bloomberg News reported. Elsewhere in Europe, just under US$2.5 billion of demand translated to around US$600 million in retail orders.
Schwab, SoFi, Robinhood and Fidelity were listed in the IPO prospectus of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, SpaceX’s formal name, as potentially offering shares to retail investors. E*TRADE by Morgan Stanley, part of the Wall Street firm whose investment banking arm was a top underwriter of the IPO, was also listed as a retail broker. A Morgan Stanley representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment. BLOOMBERG
