Back شركة استحواذ ذات غرض خاص Arabic Special Purpose Acquisition Company German Special Purpose Acquisition Company Spanish Spac Finnish Special purpose acquisition company French חברת רכישה למטרות מיוחדות HE Special Purpose Acquisition Companies Italian 特別買収目的会社 Japanese 기업인수목적회사 Korean Special Purpose Acquisition Company Dutch
A special purpose acquisition company (SPAC; /spæk/), also known as a "blank check company", is a shell corporation listed on a stock exchange with the purpose of acquiring (or merging with) a private company, thus making the private company public without going through the initial public offering process, which often carries significant procedural and regulatory burdens.[1][2] According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), SPACs are created specifically to pool funds to finance a future merger or acquisition opportunity within a set timeframe; these opportunities usually have yet to be identified while raising funds.[3]
In the U.S., SPACs are registered with the SEC and considered publicly traded companies. The general public may buy their shares on stock exchanges before any merger or acquisition takes place. For this reason they have at times been referred to as the "poor man's private equity funds."[4] The majority of companies pursuing SPACs do so on the Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange in the US, although other exchanges, such as the Euronext Amsterdam, Singapore Exchange, and Hong Kong Stock Exchange have also overseen a small volume of SPAC deals.[5]
Despite the popularity and growth in the number of SPACs, academic analysis shows investor returns on SPAC companies post-merger are almost uniformly negative, although investors in SPACs and merged companies may earn excess returns immediately after the merger.[6] Proliferation of SPACs usually accelerates around periods of economic bubbles, such as the "everything bubble" between 2020 and 2021.[7]
- ^ Domonoske, Camila (2020-12-29). "The Spectacular Rise Of SPACs: The Backwards IPO That's Taking Over Wall Street". NPR. Archived from the original on 2021-02-22.
So what is a SPAC? A "special purpose acquisition company" is a way for a company to go public without all the paperwork of a traditional IPO, or initial public offering. In an IPO, a company announces it wants to go public, then discloses a lot of details about its business operations. After that, investors put money into the company in exchange for shares. A SPAC flips that process around. Investors pool their money together first, with no idea what company they're investing in. The SPAC goes public as a shell company. The required disclosures are easier than those for a regular IPO, because a pile of money doesn't have any business operations to describe. Then, generally, the SPAC goes out and looks for a real company that wants to go public, and they merge together. The company gets the stock ticker and the pile of money much more quickly than through a normal IPO.
- ^ Broughton, Kristin; Maurer, Mark (September 22, 2020). "Why Finance Executives Choose SPACs: A Guide to the IPO Rival". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 22 February 2021.
- ^ "Blank Check Company". SEC.gov. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Retrieved 26 August 2020.
- ^ Ren, Shuli (March 8, 2021). "SPACs Are 'the Poor Man's Private Equity Funds'". Bloomberg Businessweek (4691): 72. ISSN 0007-7135. Retrieved 9 March 2021.
- ^ "Are SPAC mergers still a healthy option for tech companies aiming to go public?". KrASIA. 2022-03-23. Retrieved 2022-03-27.
- ^ Li, Yun (10 February 2021). "Unusual first-day rallies in SPACs raise bubble concern: 'Every single one of them has gone up'". CNBC. Retrieved 18 February 2021.
- ^ Naumovska, Ivana (February 18, 2021). "The SPAC Bubble Is About to Burst". Harvard Business Review. Retrieved 22 February 2021.