Mountain View, CA (October 11, 2013)– Fenwick & West is pleased to announce that partners Jeffrey Vetter and Bill Hughes co-authored a chapter on going public under the JOBS Act for the newest edition of the NYSE IPO guide. Published by the New York Stock Exchange, the guide is designed as a comprehensive resource to help companies navigate the process of going public. NYSE collaborates annually with “top industry experts” to co-author certain chapters.
At a time when companies are taking advantage of filing to go public under the Jumpstart our Business Startups (JOBS) Act and the media is buzzing with the implications, Vetter and Hughes provide some much-needed guidance about the IPO process under the JOBS Act in a chapter titled “The IPO on-ramp under the JOBS Act.”
“One of the aims of the JOBS Act was to increase the number of companies electing to complete an IPO and to provide those companies a transition period, or ‘on-ramp,’ to the public markets, allowing them to focus resources on growth of their businesses before having to expend resources toward complying with many of the regulations often cited as costly and burdensome for newly public companies,” they wrote in the guide.
Vetter and Hughes discuss what businesses qualify as emerging growth companies (EGCs) and outline a number of advantages to going public under the JOBS Act during and after the IPO process – including ways the provisions reduce costs and burdens of being a public company. They also provide a timeline for the “time-intensive process” of submitting confidentially and executing an IPO as an EGC – which they break down into stages.
Fenwick’s most recent Technology and Life Sciences IPO Survey, which provides half-yearly reviews of IPOs in the technology and life sciences sectors nationwide and showed the strongest IPO market in years, found that in a post-JOBS Act era, five issuers who were otherwise eligible to avail themselves of the SEC’s confidential submission process, elected not to do so. Four issuers who filed confidentially elected to make only one confidential submission prior to their first public filing.
The NYSE IPO guide is available as a PDF through the NYSE website.
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