Читать книгу Investment Banking For Dummies - Matthew Krantz - Страница 46

Much of what investment banks do is out in the open and public. When a giant company like Microsoft buys LinkedIn, there’s no secret about it. For one thing, LinkedIn was a publicly traded company, meaning the shares are held by the public and free to trade on a public marketplace, called a stock exchange.

But sometimes investment banks work behind the scenes to help sell off or allow private companies to conduct sales. These deals take a bit more massaging because there are no publicly traded securities from which to glean a value of the company. When dealing with publicly traded companies, there’s really no secret in terms of what price tag investors are putting on the firm. The value of a public company is its market value, which is the per-share stock price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding.

But with private companies, there is no objective and dispassionate way to measure the value of the company. The value is, plainly stated, a meeting of minds between what potential buyers are willing to pay and how much the seller is willing to accept.