Groupon ready for IPO at highest valuation since Google
Source: Peter Delevett and Jeremy C. Owens
Online daily-deals originator Groupon was prepared Friday morning to debut as a public company, offering stock that would value the Chicago company at a total seen only once before in history for a technology company's initial public offering.
Groupon filed Thursday to sell 35 million shares -- about 5.5 percent of the company, a smaller percentage than is normally offered -- at $20 apiece. That would set the company's market value at $12.7 billion, the second-highest total in tech history to Mountain View Internet giant Google (GOOG), which had a valuation of $23.1 billion when it went public in 2004.
The initial offering of Groupon's shares were expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq composite index, under the ticker symbol GRPN, at 10:40 a.m. in New York.
One of the most anticipated and hotly debated initial public offerings of the year, Groupon's performance could help grease the skids for other Internet firms -- and especially social media companies -- that have been waiting to go public amid an extended market slump.
As the second of the "big five" social media companies to go public -- after LinkedIn -- Groupon could reignite investor interest in consumer Internet companies and pave the way to new riches for valley tech executives and venture capitalists.
| }
|