Skift Take
Oyo's original use case in a country like India was the genius level breakthrough that has persisted, despite all its troubles over the last few years. Glad it is doubling down on its core focus, as this IPO doc shows.
The once high-flying Oyo has been humbled, even as it remains a mind-boggling complex global business. That is the one line summary of the very dense 642 page IPO prospectus (large PDF file) filed by the India-headquartered hotel startup locally for a proposed $1.2 billion raise, valuing the company just shy of $10 billion.
Just a few years ago, the hopes of the company and its main investor Softbank would likely have been an initial public offering in multiple billions of dollars in a flashy offering on Nasdaq or NYSE.
But the double whammy of Oyo's own internal troubles, followed by pandemic reset expectations for the company and its investors. It still remains a very complex business that grew way too fast and kept on adding things in any which way to fuel that growth. Just count the number of global direct and indirect subsidiaries Oyo has in this document, it runs into hundreds. That said, it has survived and is a smaller, more focused company, as its prospectus shows.
We went through the prospectus and picked out some nuggets that caught out eye, consider this an amateur IPO tear sheet, if you will. More accurately, screenshots of portions of the document that we think shows the current state of Oyo's business and its futur
