Groupon reportedly sets share prices at $20
Groupon is set to go public on Friday, but its share prices are going to be more expensive than expected.
AllThingsD's Kara Swisher reported on Thursday afternoon that the Chicago-based company is planning to start sell shares at $20 a pop. Furthermore, Groupon is supposedly oversubscribed, so the daily deal giant is padding on five million more shares to meet demand for its stock.
All of that taken together is significantly higher than original number of 30 million shares up for sale reported earlier today, priced between $16 and $18 a piece. Under that model, Groupon would be valued between $10.1 and $11.4 billion.
This last minute update is a bit extreme and could give investors and analysts a shake. But considering the flurry around Groupon during the last few months since the daily deal giant declared its IPO in June with the intention to raise $750 million, this just falls in line with Groupon's reputation now.
Controversies have included reports about unusual accounting schemes, costing business owners more money than they receive in return, and major drops in traffic in comparison to major competitor LivingSocial. Groupon was supposedly even bleeding money itself.
All of this taken together has given rise to the theory that Groupon could be for daily deals what MySpace has become for social networks, which isn’t a very favorable comparison if you’re at all familiar with the latter.
Several other major startups, such as Kayak and Evernote, that have made it big in the last few years and declared IPOs have evidently learned by example and have held back from rushing to go public.
Nevertheless, Groupon finally set an IPO date in October for Friday, November 4. So tomorrow morning, Groupon will start appearing on the Nasdaq exchange under the symbol, "GRPN."
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