Groupon’s IPO, Largest Since Google

One of the leading online NASDAQ:GRPN) increased the size of its initial public offering to raise $700 million. Groupon’s initial public offering became the largest offering by a United States company since Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG)’s IPO which raised $1.7 billion in the year 2004.

The current value of Groupon Inc. is almost $13 billion following the company’s decision to increase the initial public offering by 5 million shares to 35 million shares and pricing the shares at $20 each instead of the earlier decided range of $16 to $18 per share.

Groupon Inc. is a three year old company which is responsible for selling discount internet coupons and best buy deals for almost everything available in the market ranging from spa treatments to complex nose jobs and facelifts. Groupon also figures in the list of few of the most closely watched companies since its first announcement about going public sometime ago. The offering represents just 5 percent of the company and this move has helped Groupon to increase the demand and price.

Groupon started trading on NASDAQ under the ticker GRPN from today.

After the IPO, there are few concerns regarding competition from many deep pocketed giants, like Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN). There are also some concerns regarding continuous spending in order to drive user growth and also about questions regarding accounting after Groupon altered its IPO filing two times in order change the way it accounted for revenue.

LinkedIn Corp. (NYSE:LNKD) has also floated an additional shares , it is currently placed well above the initial offering price of $45 has gone down by about 9 percent after it made public its intentions to sell up to $500 million in stock. The company had floated 8.3 percent of its shares during the initial offering.

Other internet debutantes like Pandora Media Inc. (NYSE:P) an internet radio station sold nearly 10 percent of ht e company. Groupon currently commands a price tag of almost double the amount Google agreed to pay for the acquisition in the previous year.

Groupon’s shares are expected to be volatile after today especially due to the concerns about the company’s ability to generate long term profits and achieve growths in revenue in addition to the possibility that the current investors may sell their holdings at some point. Groupon’s performance will also help Wall Street to predict performance of other dotcom IPOs to come.

Post Written By: Ed Liston Ed Liston is a senior contributing editor at TheStockMarketWatch.com. An active market watcher and investor, Ed guides an independent team of experienced analysts and writes for multiple stock trader publications. He is widely quoted in various financial publications on the Internet. When Ed is not writing about stocks, investing in stocks, talking about stocks, or otherwise doing something stock related, he likes to go sailing and fishing in his yacht.