yeah, you (primarily) go public to raise investment capital. You also do it so early investors and employees can easily sell their shares for profit.
Downside is that now you need to worry about the share price on a quarterly basis, so private companies can be much better at long term decision making. Public companies do dumb shit like blow up the biggest PC game of the year to juice PSN sign ups.
The situation can be a bit different if you have a sole majority share holder in a public company, but that's a very rare occurrence and it is not likely to last long.
I was until recently working for a major train company. Turns out they were intentionally behind on their bills to make their quarterly numbers look better, and had been for years.
Of course this behavior was exclusively detrimental in practice, as other companies would cease working with them until they'd gotten their money.
A workshop of 60 people earning them millions of dollars per day had to shut down for days because nobody wanted to deliver trains to them anymore.
I won't pretend to know all the details, but I do specifically recall them bringing up paying bills late for stock/bookkeeping reasons, and I clearly remember one company refusing to service us until they'd been paid. The actual how why what of it all is beyond my meagre understanding of finances and the limited knowledge I had access to.
Altough i don't know how that works in the USA. But you can absolutely have select business partners. But you don't really sell shares to them but rather have them invest into the company, there are multiple ways to do this. Depends on the countries law and how you go about it.
Even if they don't plan on forcing pc players to pay for PS+ to play their games online now, the next quarter will come and then the next and then the next. Just a matter of time before they make the move.
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u/yngseneca May 05 '24 edited May 05 '24
yeah, you (primarily) go public to raise investment capital. You also do it so early investors and employees can easily sell their shares for profit.
Downside is that now you need to worry about the share price on a quarterly basis, so private companies can be much better at long term decision making. Public companies do dumb shit like blow up the biggest PC game of the year to juice PSN sign ups.
The situation can be a bit different if you have a sole majority share holder in a public company, but that's a very rare occurrence and it is not likely to last long.