Reverse Takeover : A Back Door to the market

Sammanfattning: The access of capital and the high market growth has resulted in an increase in the quantity of companies going public in Sweden. Most companies go through with the initial public offering (IPO) process, but there has been an increase of companies that choose to go public through an alternative method. A reverse takeover is an alternative going public transaction that has been more common and accepted over the recent years in Sweden. The going public process is reverse compared with an IPO and the method is known as the “back-door” to the market. The purpose of this report is to analyze reverse takeover on the Swedish stock exchange as an alternative to the traditional IPO, with focus on the factors behind the transaction. Through an inductive approach, data has been collected from interviews with representa-tives of financial advisory companies with experience of reverse takeovers. The aim was to clarify which factors that affects companies when they carry out a reverse takeover. A de-ductive approach has then been carried out, to provide the research with quantitative data that can act as a complement to the qualitative data. This data has been collected through a statistical analyse of reverse takeovers on the Swedish stock exchange. A reverse takeover is a faster process than an IPO. The main reason for the shorter listing process is that a reverse takeover is a transaction between two companies and the IPO is a transaction between one company and the public. Many of the reverse takeover transac-tions in Sweden were done to take advantages of the loss carry forwards in the public com-pany, which provides a possibility to reduce tax payments and go public at the same time. The publicity is lower for a reverse takeover than for an IPO, which makes it possible for the private company to take the back door to the capital market and in some way ignore the current market condition because the transaction is not depending on the demand for the company stock. A recognized pattern on the financial market is that reverse takeovers are carried out more frequently after a market crash. This agrees with what we have seen in Sweden, since pri-vate companies started to go public through reverse takeovers after the IT-crash. The re-verse takeover transaction can be viewed as a financial trend in today‟s Sweden. A few companies in Sweden have been harmed of the reverse listing process, as they have not been able to live up to the requirements from the stock exchange after they were listed. Planning and due diligence is important to be able to minimize risks when going public through a reverse takeover. The due diligence is even more important for reverse takeovers than for other transactions, since the business agreements are generally with companies that have a history of weak performance.