Wall Street’s wait is over: Groupon (NASDAQ: GRPN) is finally public, pricing Thursday night at $20 a share in one of the most widely anticipated initial public offerings in years.
Underwriters increased both the price and the number of shares offered by about 17% at the last minute, bringing the final offering to 35 million shares at $20 each and raising $700 million for the company. The offering values Groupon at $12.7 billion, a level that skeptics say is extremely high for a company without much proprietary technology in an industry with few barriers to entry.
Google is one of the companies that may be gunning for Groupon in the daily deals space. The search engine giant has recently acquired a slew of online coupon/loyalty card companies, including DailyDeal, Zave Networks, The DealMap and Punchd Labs. Amazon Local is also competing with Groupon.
Groupon’s journey to Wall Street has been a bumpy one. The company was first criticized for using nonstandard accounting practices; when Groupon standardized its reporting, its profits turned to losses. Then Groupon explained that a large chunk of its revenue goes back to the merchants who offer the coupons, and that actual revenue for the first half of this year was $688 million, less than half the $1.5 billion it had initially reported.
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