Unicorns’ growth and financial flexibility before and after the IPO

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.