Mercari’s IPO mints a new Japanese billionaire

Bloomberg

Mercari Inc. priced its initial public offering at the top of the range to sell $1.2 billion worth of shares, a valuation that’s set to make its 40-year-old founder a billionaire.
The online marketplace plans to sell 43.5 million shares at 3,000 yen apiece, at the top of the targeted range, including the sale of additional shares via a greenshoe allotment, the company said. That puts the fortune of founder Shintaro
Yamada, who owns almost a third of the company, at 115 billion yen. The indicated IPO price gives Mercari a market value of 406 billion yen, and the stock will begin trading in Tokyo on June 19.
Yamada, whose previous company was acquired by Zynga Inc., built the flea market by focusing on smartphone users, while Yahoo Japan Corp.’s dominant auctions website is mainly a desktop-based marketplace. The app, which debuted in 2013, now has more than 10 million monthly active customers. Three years after its release, Mercari became Japan’s first startup to reach the so-called unicorn valuation of $1 billion or more.
“What I hope people realise is that you don’t need to be in Silicon Valley to build a unicorn,” James Riney, the head of 500 Startups in Japan. “You can build one in Tokyo. Yamada-san was able to show that in a pretty short amount of time, which a lot of people didn’t think was possible.”
Mercari’s IPO is Japan’s biggest for a technology company since Line Corp. debuted in July 2016. The accomplishment also highlights the dearth of major private startups in the world’s third-largest economy.