Shares of Japan’s Linkage Global (LGCB) slipped below their $4.00 IPO price today – Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2023 – in their NASDAQ debut. Linkage Global’s stock opened at $3.98 – just 2 cents below its issue price – at 10:20 a.m. EST today on the NASDAQ. By midday, Linkage Global traded at $3.07, down 93 cents for a drop of 23.25 percent from its IPO price. Volume was more than 872,500 shares. Linkage Global’s stock closed today at $3.12, down 88 cents or off 22 percent from its $4.00 IPO price, on its first day of NASDAQ trading.
Linkage Global, an online retailer and a provider of e-commerce services, priced its small-cap IPO at $4.00 – the low end of its $4.00-to-$6.00 range – and sold 1.5 million shares – the same number in the prospectus – on Monday night, Dec. 18, 2023. The IPO raised $6.0 million. The company’s market cap was $106.5 million, based on the $4.00 (low end) pricing.
EF Hutton was the sole book-runner.
Linkage Global, headquartered in Tokyo, is engaged in “two lines of business complementary to each other, including (i) cross-border sales and (ii) integrated e-commerce services,” the prospectus says.
The company launched its cross-border sales operations in 2011 in Japan through Linkage Global’s subsidiary, EXTEND, the prospectus says. Most of the company’s revenue comes from Japan.
“Since our inception, the Operating Entities have selected approximately 10,000 suppliers and 100,000 featured products,” the prospectus says. Linkage Global’s customers are mainly “sellers on various e-commerce platforms, such as Amazon, Lazada, Shopee, Wish, Coupang, Yahoo, WOWMA, Rakuten, Tmall, Taobao, JD and TikTok, and independent website operators.”
Through HQT NETWORK, the company’s subsidiary in Hong Kong, the Operating Entities connect customers and other cross-border e-commerce sellers and suppliers (collectively, the “Merchants”) with social media platforms to provide digital marketing services to Merchants, according to the prospectus. HQT NETWORK has cooperated with Google Asia Pacific Pte., Ltd. (“Google”) since 2017; it became an authorized agent of Google in 2018, through making use of the vast suppliers’ and customers’ data that the Operating Entities have collected from their cross-border sales operations.
“To diversify our revenue sources, in 2021, the Operating Entities started offering services, including e-commerce operation training and software support services,” the prospectus says.
Linkage Global is profitable. The company earned net income of $1.04 million on revenue of $22.64 million for the 12 months that ended March 31, 2023, according to financial statements in the prospectus.
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