Goldman Sachs Group Inc chief executive officer Lloyd Blankfein visited the Chicago headquarters of Groupon Inc on Friday to pitch executives on hiring his firm for a possible share sale, a person familiar with the matter said.
Morgan Stanley is also in talks with Groupon to arrange an initial public offering (IPO), said the person, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private.
Goldman Sachs aims to win the mandate to handle a sale for Groupon, a two-year old company that rebuffed a US$6 billion takeover offer from Google Inc last month. The startup this week announced a round of funding said to value it at US$4.75 billion and now is weighing an IPO that may give it a US$15 billion valuation, people familiar with the matter have said.
Julie Mossler, a spokeswoman for Groupon, and David Wells, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, declined to comment. Pen Pendleton, a spokesman for Morgan Stanley, also declined to comment.
Groupon could use money raised in an IPO to step up international expansion plans. The company said it will use some of the US$950 million in funding announced this week to let employees and early investors sell shares. Private companies must keep the number of shareholders below 500 or they are subject to reporting requirements by US regulators.
Groupon sends daily deals to 50 million subscribers in 35 countries, up from 2 million subscribers in the US. a year ago. It offers daily discounts of as much as 90 percent from businesses such as restaurants, nail salons and clothing stores. It then keeps a portion of the revenue.
Investors in Groupon’s most recent funding round include venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained