Uber’s Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi said market turbulence in the U.S. would be unlikely to affect the ride-hailing titan’s plans for a public listing, Wall Street Journal reports.
“Any company that’s going public would like to do it in a positive, stable market,” Khosrowshahi said in an interview Tuesday in Singapore, pointing out that the startup is large and flexible enough to go public in almost any market.
Khosrowshahi said Uber was internally on track to list this year, having previously said he expected to seek a debut in the second half of 2019 in what would be one of the biggest public offerings planned for the year. The company is also keeping an eye out for a possible debut by rival U.S. firm Lyft Inc., which has indicated it plans to seek an IPO this year and filed confidentially with the SEC the same day Uber did.
“The good news is that we’ve got a strong balance sheet so we don’t need to go public this year,” he said. “It’s a desire, but if it doesn’t happen it doesn’t happen. I’d be disappointed and I think our shareholders would be disappointed but the company would be just fine.”
The San Francisco company’s banking advisers have suggested Uber could go public at a valuation of $120 billion, the Journal has reported. The company’s most recent private valuation was $76 billion, when it sold a roughly $500 million stake to Toyota, the Journal notes.
Tech stocks have been hard hit amid worries about the health of the global economy and trade tensions between the U.S. and China. The turmoil could cast a pall over some companies’ IPO plans in 2019. U.S. stocks closed out last year with their steepest annual declines since the financial crisis.
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