USA Today’s business pages – under the brand name 24/7 Wall Street – wrote a grim piece on Tuesday that included a list of five companies that they feared would not make it through the coronavirus downturn.
The newspaper pledged that prior to making these grim assessments the journalists had ‘reviewed corporate filings and industry publications to determine the American brands that might not survive the coronavirus crisis’.
Company number 2 on that list is StubHub. USA Today’s overview:
• Industry: Live events ticketing
With virtually all live events cancelled for the foreseeable future, ticket exchange and sale company StubHub is facing an unprecedented situation. StubHub updated its refund policy as more than 20,000 events were nixed. Company President Sukhinder Singh Cassidy told Axios that the company was unable to ‘take the risk of giving refunds to buyers before recouping the same refund from the seller.’ [Read the whole Axios interview with the StubHub CEO.]
'This elicited lawsuits from fans who say they never got refunds despite the NBA, NHL, and MLB postponing their seasons and despite the company's own refund policy'.
‘StubHub furloughed most of its staff – around 300 people. The crisis also came at a time that StubHub's US$ 4 billion buyout from Viagogo was halted by U.K. courts in February. [Read The DAIMANI Journal’s coverage of the UK regulator putting a pause on the StubHub Viagogo acquisition.]
‘StubHub and other large ticket brokers say they may have to seek a government bailout to keep the industry afloat.’
The other four companies in USA Today’s crosshairs include three in the retail/luxury market: JC Penny, Sears and Neiman Marcus, and then the massive cineplex owners AMC Theatres.
Readers of The DAIMANI Journal will know that we have been riding this particular story hard. As a company DAIMANI is implacably imposed to both how the secondary market operates in principle, specifically at the professional buyer end of the process. But also how much [but not all] of the secondary market operates in practice. That actual practice can be best be quickly understood by looking at the TrustPilot reviews of StubHub and Viagogo, the company that just completed the US$ 4 billion acquisition of StubHub from US parent eBay.
This is just a short collection of some of our reportage to date:
Will the Stubagogo deal collapse?
The US ticketing expert who predicts StubHub’s bankruptcy
And finally Inside ‘Stubagogo’ where we look at the eight investment vehicles that took on the debt financing which helped make the USD4 billion acquisition happen
