Square Files for $275m IPO

Square paymentsMobile payments firm Square has filed for its IPO (Initial Public Offering), with the maximum offering price currently standing at $275m (£178m).

The financial results included in Squares S-1 filing show that the company made revenues of $850m and a net loss of $154m in 2014. In the first half of 2015, revenues were $561 – suggesting it will outperform last years total by around half – though its looking likely to make a similar loss on that amount, with net losses for the first six months standing at $78m.

The filing also revealed that Square has broken off its exclusive partnership with Starbucks – and why. “The agreement was amended in August 2015 to eliminate the exclusivity provision in order to permit Starbucks to begin transitioning to another payment processor starting 1 October 2015,” it reads. “Under the amendment, Starbucks also agreed to pay increased processing rates to us for as long as they continue to process transactions with us. We anticipate that Starbucks will transition to another payment processor and will cease using our payment processing services prior to the scheduled expiration of the agreement in Q3 2016, and, in any event, we do not intend to renew it when it expires.”

The reasoning is simply that the deal was unprofitable for Square – it made gross losses of $27.9m from the partnership in 2014, and $14.3m in the first half of this year.

The IPO is especially notable because, following the recent announcement that Square co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey will serve as CEO of Twitter, it will make Dorsey the head of two public companies simultaneously.

“The strength of this business is more than the money it generates,” Dorsey said in his CEOs note in the filing. “The collective power of our millions of sellers sustains a scale from which we can build valuable financial services and marketing services, creating reinforcing and virtuous cycles back to our core business of payments. We’ve made getting capital as easy as tapping a button. We replaced pen and paper accounting with real-time insights into sales patterns and customer trends. Everything works together seamlessly to help our sellers make smart decisions for their businesses. When they succeed, we succeed.

“As a public company our decisions will continue to reflect what we’ve done as a private one—we put our customers first. That means constantly asking the question: how can the financial system better serve people? We’ll measure ourselves by our commitment to take the long view and focus on building a company that creates value over decades and not just a few fiscal quarters out.”

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