and New York in the final week of the campaign.
Broule said it was critical for Andrei to make one European appearance and he agreed to appear in London. China was essential as well. Huge investor funds were available though the wealth accumulated by the families of leading figures in the Communist Party, with whom Broule’s bank had assiduously cultivated relationships over a period of decades. Shanghai was added to Andrei’s schedule, all in the week before the IPO.
Rooms had been booked that could hold 500, and there were inquiries from ten times that number, eager to see the legendary Andrei Koss in the flesh. Broule said he could have sold places to the presentations for $1,000 a head. ‘We could forget the IPO,’ he joked, ‘and just do the roadshow.’
The figure of a share price that would value Fishbowl at $100 billion dollars, comfortably putting it into the handful of largest IPOs ever executed, had been in the air for over a year. The actual share price of the offering would not be set until the day before the float, when the underwriting syndicate, led by Broule and his team, would take a view about the degree of demand at various prices. Ideally they would want to go out with a number that would leave room for a bounce of 5 to 10 per cent on the first day, getting the market for the stock off to a buoyant start. It would also ensure that they could offload at a gain the stock that Mann Lever and the other underwriters were committed to take, while making a profit for favoured clients, who would receive large allocations of shares
Right from the beginning, Broule had been confident of bettering the $100 billion figure. Privately, he had been talking about a market capitalization in the order of $120 billion. By the time the roadshow started, he was talking of figures ten or twenty billion north of there, perhaps as high as $150 billion, which would make the Fishbowl IPO the largest ever seen. And the projection kept getting higher. By the time Andrei joined the roadshow in the last week before the launch, the media were speculating that the offering would value Fishbowl at $160 billion, and even at that level investors hoping for shares would be left empty-handed. Broule told Andrei that it was looking as if $180 billion wasn’t unrealistic. At that valuation, Andrei’s personal wealth on paper, with 44.7 per cent of the company, would stand at $80 billion dollars.
The first roadshow Andrei attended was in London. He sat at a table with Jenn McGrealy and Didier Broule on the podium in a huge room in the Grosvenor Hotel, facing 500 fund managers, investment managers and a select group of high-net-worth investors. He had avoided the media scrum that had gathered outside the hotel in expectation of snapping shots of him as he arrived by the simple expedient of staying there the night before the presentation.
The plan was for Didier to introduce him, then Andrei would outline his vision for the business, Jenn McGrealy would give the presentation on the company’s operations that she had been giving for two weeks already, and Didier would then give his presentation on Fishbowl from an investment perspective, which was more finely tuned to the interests and concerns of fund managers and investors. Then there would be questions from the floor.
Andrei’s presentation had been drafted by the bankers and modified over a few rounds of to and fro revisions. It took around twenty minutes and went off without incident. He even tried a couple of the apparent ad lib jokes the bankers had scripted for him and got laughs from the audience. Then Jenn stood up.
Andrei watched her as she outlined the operational strengths of the business, its commercial effectiveness, its technological development pipeline, its risk management, its resilience. He had never heard the capabilities of the business outlined in this way, and he was impressed. More than impressed – awestruck. At one point he found himself listening to the pitch, and suddenly thinking, as if he were someone who was completely outside it: This is a hell of a business! His next thought was: Did I build this thing? He knew that the answer was no. He could never have built what Jenn had built. He didn’t think James Langan could have built it, either. Jenn was far superior. He had got one thing right, he thought. Listening to Jenn speaking, it struck