A123 Systems Co-founder Confirms Lucky 8 Influenced Timing of IPO Filing
Robert Buderi8/12/08Comments (1)Follow @bbuderi
Turns out our hunch was correct. On Friday, Watertown, MA-based maker of advanced batteries A123 Systems filed for its long-anticipated IPO. Since the filing came on August 8, 2008—an exceedingly lucky date, according to Chinese numerology—and because A123 has big operations in China and was co-founded by Taiwan-born MIT professor Yet-Ming Chiang, we speculated that the timing might be meaningful.
I pinged a company official on Friday to try to see if numerology had indeed played a role in the filing, but received no word back at the time. After my story ran, though, I heard from Chiang, who confirmed the basic theory—but revealed that A123 availed itself of a couple more lucky eights than I had guessed.
As Chiang e-mailed: “It was not a coincidence that the ‘send’ button was pushed at 8:08am on 8/8/08, although I wasn’t the one who did it!”
Bob is Xconomy's founder and editor in chief. You can e-mail him at bbuderi@xconomy.com, call him at 617.500.5926, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/bbuderi.
Daniel Weinreb
8/13/08 7:27 am
There have been extraordinary few IPO’s this calendar year: only three tech IPO’s, and 31 IPO’s in all, so far (actually up to 6/30/08). That’s way, way down. There were 60 tech IPO’s in 2007, for example. The previous low for this century was 17 tech IPO’s in 2001.
Advanced battery systems are something the world needs badly. I wish A123 Systems the best!