Zhou Man, Kartanaitė Inga, Norvaišienė Rasa, Kovalov Bohdan, Krušinskas Rytis
Xi'an Pei Hua University, School of Accounting and Finance, Xi'an, 710100, Shaanxi, China.
Kaunas University of Technology, School of Economics and Business, K. Donelaicio st. 73, LT-44249, Kaunas, Lithuania.
Heliyon. 2023 Sep 19;9(9):e20313. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e20313. eCollection 2023 Sep.
Increasing number of unicorns worldwide is attracting researchers' attention to analyze their phenomena from their growth and financial flexibility interaction perspective. Unicorns as young companies have many external and internal environment development elements affecting their financial performance while going public with an IPO. Thus in the paper, we target to analyze factors revealing unicorns' growth and the relationship between financial flexibility and unicorns' growth before and after the IPO process. The financial data of 20 unicorns from Asia with IPOs from 2009 to 2018 was collected for the research. A literature review was performed to develop the frame and variables of growth and financial flexibility for research design. OLS regression was used for the analysis. Our main findings show the significant negative impact of EBIT on the growth of unicorns before the IPO, which becomes positive after the IPO. The impact of cash or debt on the growth of unicorns is negative after the IPO. The growth of unicorns is significantly influenced by capital expenditures and current liabilities affected by their management policies. Our research fills the existing gap in the literature by analyzing the interaction between the growth and financial flexibility of the high-growth unicorns in the context of the IPO and enriches existing literature by the combination of different theories to support the research, thus further research could focus on a more in-depth analysis of these processes.
全球独角兽企业数量的不断增加正吸引着研究人员从其增长与财务灵活性相互作用的角度来分析这些现象。独角兽企业作为年轻的公司，在通过首次公开募股（IPO）上市时，有许多外部和内部环境发展因素影响其财务表现。因此，在本文中，我们旨在分析揭示独角兽企业增长的因素以及IPO前后财务灵活性与独角兽企业增长之间的关系。我们收集了2009年至2018年进行IPO的20家亚洲独角兽企业的财务数据用于研究。进行了文献综述以构建研究设计中增长和财务灵活性的框架及变量。采用普通最小二乘法（OLS）回归进行分析。我们的主要研究结果表明，息税前利润（EBIT）在IPO前对独角兽企业的增长有显著负面影响，而在IPO后变为正面影响。IPO后现金或债务对独角兽企业增长的影响为负面。独角兽企业的增长受到资本支出和受其管理政策影响的流动负债的显著影响。我们的研究通过分析高增长独角兽企业在IPO背景下增长与财务灵活性之间的相互作用填补了现有文献中的空白，并通过结合不同理论来支持研究丰富了现有文献，因此进一步的研究可以专注于对这些过程进行更深入的分析。
