Web hosting company GoDaddy is going strong in its first day as a public company. The company, which yesterday priced its IPO at $20 per share with plans to sell 23 million shares, raised some $460 million today as it saw its stock pop over 30%
in its debut on the NYSE, opening at $26.15. Trading under the GDDY
ticker, at the time of writing, GoDaddy’s stock has continued to rise
and is currently at 30% above its opening price, working out to a market
cap of $6.3 billion.GoDaddy originally expected to price its offering at between $17 and $19 per share.
The company currently has around 12.7 million customers for products that range from domain registration and hosting through to a range of services for many of the small businesses that make up the majority of its customers.
These include things like mobile web services, accounting, payments and more. Not only does this give GoDaddy revenue stream less dependent on one product, but it also helps differentiate the service from that of its competitors, with domain registration and web hosting in many ways commoditised products.
GoDaddy has reported that in 2014 it had revenues of nearly $1.4 billion in 2014, with a net loss of $143 million, metrics that are not too out of sync with that of other cloud-based tech businesses. Notably, GoDaddy is slowly turning things around, reducing its net loss while growing revenues. The rise in price today seems to point to an investment climate that is willing to ride those losses for the moment, since the numbers are generally moving in the right direction.
GoDaddy first filed for an IPO in June last year, some three years after it was acquired by KKR.
Anthony Ha and Steve Long are on the trading floor, and we’ll update with more from them, as well as how the stock price is performing.