An IPO's Stock Can Fall on One Exact Date Months After Listing, No Bad News Required. The Lock-Up Expiry Is Why
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6 min read
On 30 November 2022, GoTo Gojek Tokopedia's stock (GOTO) touched an all-time low of Rp151, its ninth straight day of losses (CNBC Indonesia). There was no fresh bad news that day. What changed was the calendar: it was the last day of GOTO's IPO lock-up period, the window during which people who got shares before the IPO go public are barred from selling them. On the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX, or BEI in Indonesian), a lock-up expiry is one of the few price-moving events you can actually find on a calendar, months ahead of time.
A lock-up period stops a company's founders, early investors and staff who received shares before the IPO from selling those shares for a set stretch after the company lists. The rule that sets this in Indonesia is Otoritas Jasa Keuangan (OJK) Regulation No. 25/POJK.04/2017. Under its Article 2, anyone who got shares priced below the IPO offer price within six months before the company filed its registration statement cannot sell any of that stake until eight months after the registration becomes effective (Hukumonline; the regulation's own text is published by IDX's go-public portal).
That eight-month countdown is why a lock-up expiry date can be pinned down almost as precisely as an earnings date, well before it arrives. It has nothing to do with how the business is actually performing that week.
GoTo's own case shows the mechanic clearly. The lock-up on its Series A pre-IPO shares ran out on 30 November 2022 (Liputan6). The stock had already fallen for nine consecutive trading days heading into that date, down 19.9% over the final week alone (CNBC Indonesia).
Once the lock-up actually lifted on 1 December 2022, the selling didn't stop. BEI's own director of company assessment, I Gede Nyoman Yetna, said GOTO hit its daily lower trading limit (auto rejection bawah, IDX's circuit breaker for a steep one-day fall) seven times in the trading days that followed (Antara). Over the following month, the stock lost 34% of its value (Antara).
None of that month's decline was pinned on a new product failure, a bad earnings report or a regulatory problem. The proximate trigger reported at the time was simply that a large pool of previously locked shares had just become sellable, and enough holders chose to sell.
If a lock-up expiry guaranteed a crash, it wouldn't be worth writing about separately from any other risk. It doesn't. Bukalapak (BUKA) is the counter-example from the same market.
BUKA's own eight-month lock-up, running from its 26 July 2021 IPO, ended 26 March 2022, with previously locked shares tradable from Monday, 28 March 2022 (Kompas). Instead of dropping, BUKA rose 8.44% to Rp334 on that first tradable day, then gained again on the Tuesday and Wednesday, up 25.1% for the week to Rp378 (IDN Financials; CNBC Indonesia).
Newly-unlocked holders did not rush to dump BUKA that week the way GOTO's did seven months later. BUKA's much longer decline since its IPO, down roughly 69% from its Rp1,060 offer price, played out over the following years for reasons unrelated to that one expiry date.
The useful distinction is between a calendar-driven risk and a fundamentals-driven one. A lock-up expiry date is published, or derivable from the IPO prospectus, the moment a company lists. Nothing about the company's actual sales, margins or competitive position has to change for that date to matter, because what changes is purely the supply of sellable shares.
That is also why the two case studies above don't contradict each other. Both stocks hit their lock-up expiry with a larger pool of shares suddenly free to trade. What differed was whether the specific holders behind those shares, at that specific moment, decided selling made sense for them. A stock trading near an all-time low already, the way GOTO was, gives nervous holders less reason to keep waiting. A stock that a large shareholder still believes in can sail through the same date without incident.
Three things are worth checking on any IDX stock still inside its first year of trading, rather than assuming either outcome:
None of this tells you whether a specific stock will behave like GoTo or like Bukalapak once its own lock-up runs out. It tells you which stocks even carry that specific, dateable risk in the first place.
NetWort's ticker directory lists every IDX, US and crypto asset the platform tracks, GoTo included, with its current price and trading data in one place. Pull up GoTo's own asset page to see where the stock actually sits today, well past the lock-up event described above, rather than relying on a screenshot from 2022.