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Tencent is bringing its music division to the US
Tencent's push onto American entertainment is going beyond gaming and movies. Now the Chinese conglomerate will bring its Tencent Music Entertainment division to domestic shores, as spotted by TechCrunch. Over the weekend, the company announced (PDF) that it will put its music division on a "recognized stock exchange in the United States." Last year, it was rumored that Tencent tried buying Spotify, but those talks fell through.
Xiaomi's Hong Kong IPO expected to raise at least $10 billion
Xiaomi's interest in listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange hasn't exactly been a well-kept secret, and following months of speculation, the time has finally arrived. Today, the Chinese smartphone maker filed its initial public offering documents, and according to Bloomberg's sources, this IPO is expected to raise "at least $10 billion." This would make it the world's largest IPO since Alibaba listed for $25 billion in New York back in 2014. Furthermore, Bloomberg said Xiaomi may see a valuation of "as high as $100 billion," which is about one-ninth of Apple's.
Spotify's plan to go public might not include an IPO
Now that Spotify is locking down long-term deals with record labels, the company's next big task is going public. Before you run to the hills at the sound of financial speak, this influx of cash could help the company you know and love keep delivering the tunes you listen to on a daily basis. Rather than a typical initial public offering (IPO), Wall Street Journal says that the Swedish company may instead use a direct listing.
New stock exchange fights unfair online trading
Some (such as The Big Short author Michael Lewis) see high-frequency, algorithm-based stock trading as a serious threat to the economy. There's a concern that big trading firms are cornering the market by paying for ultra-fast connections that give them unfair advantages, such as front running (exploiting knowledge of advance orders from customers) and otherwise closing transactions before most rivals. Those financial heavyweights might not get to abuse the system if IEX has its way, though. It just opened a US stock exchange that aims to prevent these computer-driven attempts to game the system.
Twitter quietly adds clickable stock symbols
It might not pack the same thrill as the rumors of in-feed video, but Twitter has added clickable stock symbols on tweets. This now throws up search results for both the stock and the company, using a new 'cash' tag, like $FB, to differentiate from typical links and tags. As noted by TNW, it's bad news for the founder of StockTwits, a service that offered similar functionality to gather tweet-based financial nuggets. The new feature is live across Twitter's web client -- though it hasn't hit TweetDeck just yet -- and should make discovering exactly how many millions companies have made (or lost) all a bit faster.
Pandora Media offering IPO tomorrow
Music service Pandora is set to introduce its stock to the public tomorrow, becoming one more in a series of social networking and online service companies going with an IPO. Pandora isn't specifically an iOS company, of course, given that its music service runs both through browsers and on a number of platforms. But the company's iOS app has helped its profile. It's consistently stayed one of the top free apps on the App Store. The company's offering 14.7 million shares initially. Pandora's future wasn't ever in actual jeopardy, but certainly the value of the company's app was in question during the lead-up to last week's Apple keynote at WWDC. For a while, iCloud was rumored as being an iTunes streaming service like Pandora, allowing you to listen to your music collection through any iOS device. Those rumors turned out to be untrue so far. iCloud and iTunes Match are only designed to help you sync your iTunes songs across devices, not listen to them remotely. For those whose music collections are too big to fit on an iOS device, Pandora is still one of the main ways to listen to extra music. [via Mashable]
AAPL's top owners have cashed in some stock recently
Fortune's Apple 2.0 blog has an interesting tidbit about Apple's stock lately. A blogger who calls himself Sammy the Walrus IV has been poking around into AAPL records, and has found out that several of Apple's top shareholders have sold some of the stock recently. There's nothing shocking here (nothing outside of the usual buy and sell on the stock exchange), but the numbers are interesting, with firms like Janus Capital and Capital Research investing back into AAPL for over a billion dollars each. Four of the top 10 holders of Apple shares have sold off some this past quarter, including Goldman Sachs, who got rid of 61% of its shares, and these same top 10 holders basically determine the fate of AAPL, as they own around 25% of the company as a whole. Again, these are all routine sales, and as you can see from the chart above, there's still plenty of AAPL buying going on (and we'll even state the obvious: this post should not be considered financial advice). But it's an interesting overview of some of the core firms and shareholders behind the movements of AAPL lately.
