LA Times Media Group Chairman + CEO Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong Talks NYSE IPO

Thank you for having me. It's so exciting to be on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and we announced it yesterday and this is our path to going public.

So, this is an opportunity to go from ink to digital and this is the really evolution of a 144-year-old paper. So when you think about what we are, we are truly a newspaper with integrity, investigative reporting, 144 years of IP. Frankly, when you integrate that with the Los Angeles Times Studio, things like we're doing right now where you have discussions, podcasting, events, streaming live. That's a Los Angeles Times Studio. But we've gone further. We now have a thing called the Nant Studio, which is the most sophisticated LED volume where both ads, movies, events all the way to esports and virtual sports and making that available to the audience. There's 3.2 billion viewers that watch esports competitions, gaming, and then going from the crosswords and with the Nant Games to interactive games. When you put all that together under one roof of a content management system called Graphene which we've taken seven years to build and now you evolve from ink to digital. There will still be and there should be our audience who want to have the touch and feel of paper. We'll continue to print that. But if you want a digital feel of paper, we have a thing called the e-newspaper that you can actually touch and feel and look as if it's a paper and go directly to the story. So that's what this Los Angeles Times Media Group is. And I'm so pleased that our partnership with New York Stock Exchange and us being on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in which real live feed from the financial world which is really important in stock trading world will be streamed from here. So, it's fun for me to be here on the first day in which we announced the fact that we have opportunity to go public and we will go public and it'll be on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol LAT.

Well, I think you raised the correct question is the world is now mobile. I've not had a physical computer for years and years, literally for six or seven years. I do everything on my phone. But the opportunity to bring the global world together and maybe we should discuss one of the future opportunities in terms of tokenization. So this whole area of blockchain, digital blockchain, digital securities, digital asset transfer, stable coin, bitcoin may sound foreign to a lot of people. I believe that's the future of asset transfers. So imagine the day would arrive when in fact that day may be soon where anybody in the world could get a thousandth of a piece of stock of a virtual Hathaway but couldn't afford it but do it through a token. So I believe that tokenization is the future of security stock exchange, bond stock exchange tied to blockchain so that there's no fraudulent transactions and very safe that'll happen on your mobile device and this is the future where we will bring through the Los Angeles Times Media Group together partnerships with stock exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange, modernize even securities exchange.