Japan’s biggest taxi app raised $553 million in the country’s largest IPO this year

Go Inc., Japan’s most widely used taxi-hailing app, begins trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Tuesday after raising ¥88.6 billion ($553 million) in the country’s largest initial public offering this year. The offering was more than 25 times oversubscribed. Investors valued the company at ¥186 billion.

The IPO priced at ¥2,400 per share, the top of the marketed range of ¥2,350 to ¥2,400. International investors were allocated 70 per cent of the offering, with local retail investors receiving 25 per cent and domestic institutions getting 5 per cent. More than 180 entities expressed interest in the international portion alone, making that tranche roughly 20 times oversubscribed.

BlackRock, Wellington Management, and M&G Investment Management have all committed to buy shares, according to the company’s English prospectus. Goldman Sachs, which invested ¥10 billion in Go in 2023 at a ¥135 billion valuation, is one of the offering’s joint global coordinators alongside Nomura Holdings and Bank of America.

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

Go operates Japan’s dominant taxi booking platform, competing with Uber, China-based Didi Global, and S.Ride, a local rival in which Sony Group has invested. The company estimates revenue of ¥40.8 billion for the fiscal year ending May 31, up about 30 per cent from the previous year. Operating profit is expected to more than double, reaching ¥7 billion from ¥2.7 billion.

The debut comes at a difficult moment for Japan’s IPO market. Only 17 offerings have priced so far this year, the fewest since 2011 according to Bloomberg data. Total proceeds from those listings amount to just ¥144 billion, the lowest first-half figure since 2022.

Investors are drawn to Go’s position in a market with room to grow. Japan’s taxi industry remains heavily fragmented, with most bookings still made by phone or street hail rather than through an app. Go’s commission-based model gives it a clear path to higher margins as digital penetration increases, according to people familiar with the investor discussions.

The ¥2,400 price implies a price-to-earnings ratio of about 29 times, which some analysts view as stretched. “We would wait for a post-IPO pullback to make an entry,” Shifara Samsudeen, an analyst at LightStream Research, wrote in a report published on SmartKarma. Increased competition and regulatory changes are among the risks investors cited.

Go’s IPO is a rare bright spot for the Tokyo Stock Exchange, where the market’s attention has been consumed by the AI rally that briefly pushed SoftBank past Toyota as Japan’s most valuable company. The exchange’s reform push has made it harder for smaller companies to list, contributing to the drought in new offerings. Go is the kind of listing the TSE has been trying to attract: a technology platform with strong revenue growth and international investor interest.

The international appetite for Go also reflects a broader shift. Japanese retail investors poured $2.2 billion into SpaceX’s $75 billion Nasdaq listing last week, while Go’s offering moved in the opposite direction, pulling global capital into Tokyo. The cross-border flow suggests that investor appetite for tech IPOs remains strong on both sides of the Pacific, even as the number of new listings in Japan has fallen to a 15-year low.

A strong first day of trading would signal that the Tokyo market can still attract large, well-structured offerings despite the broader IPO slowdown. A weak one would reinforce the narrative that Japan’s capital markets are being hollowed out by the AI-driven concentration in a handful of mega-cap stocks. Go’s debut will not resolve that question, but it will frame the next chapter of it.