Robinhood IPO Gains Momentum After Overcoming Adversities

[Asia Economy Reporter Yujin Cho] Robinhood, which agreed to pay fines and compensation for trading restrictions and providing false information, is shaking off the setbacks and accelerating its initial public offering (IPO).

According to Bloomberg News, the U.S. online stock trading platform Robinhood submitted IPO application documents to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on the 1st (local time).

Robinhood aims to raise a total of $100 million through this IPO. The company plans to allocate 20-35% of the offered shares to individual investors.

When the IPO plan was announced in March, the goal was to list in June, but due to internal and external setbacks, the listing process has been delayed, and the listing date is expected to be postponed to this fall.

According to the documents submitted to the SEC on this day, Robinhood posted annual revenue of $959 million (about 1.09 trillion KRW) last year. This is a 245% increase compared to 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the same period, it recorded a net profit of $7.45 million, turning profitable from a net loss of $107 million the previous year. In the first quarter of this year, it continued its growth trend with revenue of $128 million, a 309% increase compared to the same period last year.

Robinhood's strong performance is due to the surge in stock investment enthusiasm among individual investors. Stocks of non-face-to-face related companies, which benefited from the COVID-19 pandemic, showed a bullish trend, and the meme culture, including the GameStop stock price surge incident, rapidly expanded its business.

As of the end of March this year, Robinhood's customer accounts numbered 18 million, a 151% increase from 7.2 million in the same month last year. During the same period, the total balance in customer accounts also increased from $19.2 billion to $80 billion.

Earlier this year, Robinhood was fined a record $70 million (including compensation) by the U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) for causing harm to customers by restricting trading of some highly volatile stocks and providing false information.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.