Hello, I'm Evan Davis and thank you for downloading this program.

In this edition of the bottom line, with big names like Twitter, Poundland and the AA floating on the stock market,

we discuss what it means for a company to go public.

Hello and welcome to the program.

Turn on the business news and you often hear about a company floating on the stock market.

Poundland, Pets at Home and Saga are some of the big brands to have listed their shares last year when prices were riding high in fact.

And we are going to delve deeply into the topic today.

Now there are different terms that are used not quite interchangeably, but more or less,

floatations, IPOs, initial public offerings, companies coming to the market or going public.

The key point is that you take a company in the possession of a relatively small closed coterie

of owners and you start selling shares more widely to the public or financial institutions

with a listing on a stock market somewhere. It is usually seen as the defining feature of

adulthood for a young company to come to market, and it does usually mark a massive culture change

as well. Often, it's an adventure, and sometimes it ends in tears. Well, my three guests

each have their own experience of stock market flotations. Let's meet them. First up, Martin Clark,

who's the chief financial officer at the AA, a well-known motoring organisation and one that went

public last year. Martin, why don't you just remind us

a little of the history of the AA? Sure, the AA was formed 110 years ago by a group of motoring

enthusiasts and it was designed to protect motors from the police. Hence, the famous salute to

tell motorists that there was an impending speed trap.

So for 95 years, the AA was effectively a mutual.

It was owned by its members.

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