If you didn’t realize that Kioxia finally held its Initial Public Offering (IPO) on 16 December, 2024, you are in the majority. The IPO was held a couple of days before initially planned on the Tokyo Stock Exchange where Kioxia is traded as number 285a.
The event was barely covered by the press outside of Japan, and Kioxia only issued a Japanese-language press release that day. A minimal release is now on the company’s English-language website, dated 18 December 2024, although The Memory Guy didn’t find it there when looking for it on the 20th. Bain Capital was the lead investor for the spin-out, and Bain’s website says no more than the fact that the company was spun out of Toshiba and is now called Kioxia. Bain’s statement has no mention of an IPO, which is usually the crowning achievement of such a deal.
This silence is remarkable, since Kioxia has had a penchant for issuing “Leaks” as often as once a day during other major corporate events like its spin out from Toshiba and the numerous times a merger with Western Digital has been rumored, or even prior expected IPO dates.
Furthermore, the typical IPO is widely promoted in efforts to attract more investors who might increase the stock’s price through high demand. That didn’t happen this time.
It’s only natural to look for more information about Kioxia’s financials on its website, but the only financials are Japanese language versions of PDFs that I have not yet taken the time to translate. I understand that there’s a prospectus, but I have not yet obtained a copy. You can find Kioxia’s stock price on Google, though.
Trading opened at a share price of ¥1,601, and increased on its second day to ¥1,720 then dropped to ¥1,554, and has now settled to ¥1,645. This puts the company’s current market capitalization at ¥886.76 billion, or about $5.6 billion.
Bain coordinated Kioxia’s $18 billion buyout from parent Toshiba, with investors that included Bain itself, the Industrial Bank of Japan, Western Digital, and even SK hynix, but the purchase price does not compare at all well to Kioxia’s current $5.6 billion valuation. This probably has a lot to do with market timing. The industry underwent two very significant surges in 2022 and 2018, during which times the IPO may have been better received, but despite rumors of IPOs at those times, the actual event only happened this month.
The Memory Guy wishes the company well as a publicly-traded entity, and looks forward to more candid financial disclosures from Kioxia in the future, as is required of publicly-traded companies.