Univision Scraps IPO in an Overall Quiet Week of IPOs

​Last week was a quiet week for IPO activity. A few notable public offerings were the cancellation of a private equity-backed broadcasting firm's IPO, a biopharmaceutical and artificial intelligence firm, and the registration for a Latin-American broadcasting division IPO by telecom giant, AT&T.

• Last Tuesday, March 6th, Univision Communications Inc., the Spanish-language broadcaster, scrapped its IPO plans, citing rough market conditions for public media firms as its major concern. The firm had been registered for an IPO since 2015 but continually pushed it back due to shaky market conditions and weak public media stock performance. The next day, CEO Randy Falco announced his intentions to step down at the end of the 2018 fiscal year.

• On Thursday, March 8th, BioXcel Therapeutics (NASDAQ: BTAI) began trading over 5 million common shares on the NASDAQ at roughly $11 per share. The public offering is scheduled to close on Monday, March 12th. The Branford, Connecticut-based firm is a subsidiary of its parent company, BioXcel Corp. The year-old firm is a clinical stage biopharmaceutical development company that utilizes innovative artificial intelligence (AI) to identify potential medicines across the neuroscience and immuno-oncology disorder space. The firm hopes to raise roughly $69 million from the IPO.

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• Last Thursday, AT&T (NYSE: T) registered to take its DIRECTV Latin America Business (NYSE: VRIO) public. Vrio Corp. is AT&T's holding company that operates the Latin American digital entertainment services across South America and the Caribbean. The unit's public offering could raise $100 million for the firm. Analysts speculate that the pending IPO could be a way for AT&T to sell off the unit, as the telecom firm needs to pay down debt for its potential merger with Time Warner (NYSE: TWX). At the end of the 2017 fiscal year, DIRECTV Latin America had roughly 13.6 million subscribers in eight South American countries and three Caribbean countries, up 9.3% year over year. Also, the end of last year showed the Latin American unit brought roughly $5.57 billion in revenue and $222 million in net income.