Roadshow
A roadshow is a series of presentations in which a company meets in person with institutional investors shortly before an IPO or a major financing round, in order to generate interest and raise capital. It is considered a decisive phase in which the eventual offering price and demand for the shares take shape.
When a company wants to go public, it needs buyers for its shares. To that end, executives and investment bankers travel through several cities — often New York, London, Frankfurt, Hong Kong — and present the company there to large pools of capital such as insurers or pension funds. This chain of appointments is called a roadshow. It typically lasts one to three weeks and is the final step before the share’s offering price is set. How many shares investors want to subscribe to over the course of the roadshow directly determines whether the offering is oversubscribed or falls flat.
Why a share’s price depends on the roadshow
Before an IPO, nobody knows the “right” price for a new share. There is no market yet, no trading, no comparable prices. The roadshow solves this problem through a structured procedure called bookbuilding: the bank collects binding purchase intentions from investors within a pre-set price range and derives the final offering price from them.
If, within a few days, ten times more demand comes in than there are shares available, this is referred to as tenfold oversubscription. That gives the company negotiating power: it can set the price closer to the upper end of the range. If demand is weak, the price slides downward — or the IPO is postponed altogether.
How a typical roadshow unfolds
During preparation, the bank draws up a detailed information document, the prospectus. It contains business figures, risks, and the planned price range. A few days before the roadshow begins, the company publishes this prospectus — which is a legal requirement in most countries.
What follows are usually ten to fifteen individual meetings per week: a breakfast presentation in Frankfurt, lunch in Paris, an evening discussion in London. The CEO and CFO are at the center of these meetings. Institutional investors can ask questions directly, challenge the figures, and signal their purchase intentions. Retail investors are excluded at this stage — they can only buy shares after the first day of trading.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, many roadshows have run wholly or partly virtually, via video conference. This saves on travel costs and allows for more meetings per day. Some bankers see this as a lasting shift; others stress that in-person meetings build a kind of trust that a screen cannot replace.
Roadshows in financial and technology reporting
In the financial press, the word roadshow almost always appears in connection with upcoming IPOs. When, for instance, a major tech company announces it will soon launch a roadshow, this is taken as a reliable signal: the IPO is only a few weeks away. Analyst commentary, price-target estimates, and media coverage then tend to pile up during this phase.
Well-known examples from the recent past: chipmaker Arm held an intensive roadshow in 2023 before listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York that September, at a valuation of roughly $54 billion. Large capital increases — that is, when an already listed company issues new shares — can also involve a shortened roadshow, sometimes lasting just a single day.
The term is occasionally used outside the stock-market context as well: product manufacturers or political campaign teams sometimes speak of a “roadshow” when touring multiple cities with a presentation. In financial and tech news contexts, however, it almost exclusively refers to the IPO roadshow.