By Svea Herbst Bayliss
(Reuters) – The U.S. launch of billionaire investor Bill Ackman’s new Pershing Square USA fund has been delayed without giving a reason, the New York Stock Exchange said on Friday.
The exchange said on its website late Friday that the initial public offering, which was expected to price on Monday, was now “pending a date to be announced.”
Ackman said the deal was moving forward, and a person familiar with his thinking said he hoped pricing would happen early next week or early the following week.
“Pershing Square USA LLC is proceeding with its initial public offering (the ‘IPO’) of its beneficially held common stock (the ‘Common Stock’) with a pricing date to be announced,” Ackman said in a statement, mirroring the exchange’s statement.
No reason was given for the delay.
The delay represents the latest complication to the offering, which comes just days after the hedge fund manager asked his investors to contribute cash to the fundraising and told them he would raise much less money than initially planned.
Pershing Square USA, Ackman’s first new fund in a decade, was initially expected to raise as much as $25 billion in fresh capital and more than double his assets under management. This week, Ackman said the fundraising would now be capped at $10 billion and that he expected to raise between $2.5 billion and $4 billion.
The reduced figures were detailed in a letter Ackman sent to investors in his management firm that he intended to keep secret. His lawyers said the figures should be disclosed to the public on Thursday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Ackman, who has a large presence on social media platform X where he addresses topics ranging from political races to higher education to the dangers of sugary foods, hopes individual investors will find the offering as attractive as institutional shareholders.
In the letter, he told his investors that a large pension fund and a prominent mutual fund had already committed to invest.
But he acknowledged that potential shareholders had expressed some concerns about the structure of the new fund, how quickly the money would be invested, and who would invest.
Since January, Pershing Square Holdings, his decade-old closed-end fund that provides his company with permanent capital, has returned 6.4%.
Since its launch two decades ago, Ackman’s hedge fund has returned 16.5% annually. In a video pitching investors to the deal, Ackman said that if it had existed in its current form, Pershing Square USA would have returned 19.4% over that period. That would have outperformed the stock market index by about 9.3 percentage points annually.
He said in the video that over the past six and a half years the return would have been 31%.