After a series of earlier attempts that didn’t pan out, TikTok rival Triller is finally a publicly traded company.
Having completed a merger with Hong Kong-focused financial services company AGBA, the new Triller Group Inc. debuted on the NASDAQ exchange on Wednesday (October 16).
As of mid-day Eastern time, Triller Group’s stock (ticker symbol ILLR) was trading at $4.45 per share, down about 20% from its opening price of $5.60. Shares had spiked on opening to as high as $6.52 before pulling back.
Its current share price gives Triller Group a market capitalization of around $705 million – well short of the $4 billion that Triller and AGBA targeted when they announced the merger last spring.
The new Triller Group operates two main businesses: Triller Corp. and AGBA Group Holding Limited.
Under the terms of the all-stock merger, Triller shareholders received 70% of the combined company’s outstanding common stock, while AGBA shareholders received 30%.
The listing marks the culmination of several years of efforts by Triller to go public, which included a proposed SPAC merger with SeaChange International, targeting an initial valuation of $5 billion, in 2022.
When that fell through, the company then aimed for a direct listing, in what it said would be “the largest creator IPO in history.”
That, too, failed to materialize, and the company launched yet another bid in 2023 before announcing the AGBA merger in April 2024.
Under the plan announced at that time, Triller co-founder Bobby Sarnevesht was slated to serve as CEO of Triller Corp., while Bob Diamond would serve as Group Chairman and AGBA Chairman Wing-Fai Ng was slated to be Group CEO. More recently, the companies announced that Sarnevesht would also serve as a Director of the merged company.
In a statement on Tuesday, Triller Group said it would reveal details about “future leadership, strategy and objectives” on October 22.
Both of the businesses that comprise Triller Group showed signs of financial strain prior to the merger.
AGBA, a Hong Kong-focused financial services company that claims 400,000 customers, reported a 55.8% YoY drop in revenues in the first half of 2024, driven by a steep drop in commissions, which it attributed to “the economic recession [in China] and outward migration in Hong Kong.”
In the years before the merger, Triller was hit with a series of lawsuits over non-payment of licensing fees for music on its platform, including a 2022 suit from Sony Music, accusing the company of using “millions of dollars” of music without authorization. That suit was settled in 2023, but Triller then faced another lawsuit, this one from Universal Music Group over allegedly unpaid music licensing fees.
In an SEC filing earlier this year, in advance of its planned IPO, Triller revealed that it owed music rightsholders $23.6 million in unpaid fees. The company, which had raised more than $420 million from investors, had less than $1 million in cash and cash equivalents on hand.
As part of the merger plan agreed to by shareholders in September, Triller Group has set aside 50 million shares of the company to be “applied toward future settlement of certain Triller legal and financial obligations.”
At the current market price, those shares are worth $222.5 million.Music Business Worldwide
