GoPro went through one of the most successful public offering on the Nasdaq stock exchange in recent times. The shares were priced at $24 last Wednesday, at the high end of a previously set range of $21-24, valuing the young American action camera company at $2.96 billion. However, the stock closed 30 percent higher at $31.34 on the first day of trading, with 44 million shares changing hands for as much as $33.
The initial public offering raised a total of $427.2 million through the sale of existing shares and the issuance of new ones, and the amount could grow to $491 million with the exercise of an over-allotment option. The family of GoPro's founder, Nicholas Woodman, will remain with a stake of 49 percent.
Interestingly, GoPro gave small investors access to its initial public offering, with as little as $100 and as much as $10,000 to invest without any fees. It used the Loyal3 Social Ipo Platform to make an allocation of its Class A common stock to customers and fans at the same price and at the same time as institutional investors. The offer was only open to U.S. residents, and it made them rich from day one.
Meanwhile, Wall Street is gearing up for another interesting public offering as Alibaba, the giant Chinese e-commerce operator, has decided to list on the New York Stock Exchange in July or in August, raising a record $20 billion with a possible market valuation of $170 billion.
Alibaba is basically a huge internet portal that comprises a large marketplace, Taobao, and a large internet platform for sales to consumers, Tmall.com, along with other web-related services. It processed merchandise worth $248 billion in China last year, or more than Amazon and eBay together, collecting commissions from the hosted brands and retailers. Taobao alone features nearly one billion products.
Customer traffic has been growing rapidly on Alibaba's internet malls. Alibaba's sites account for more than two-thirds of all the parcels delivered in China. About half of the online payments made in China go through Allpay, the company's escrow service.
Shoes, especially athletic shoes, are a major category of products sold through Alibaba and other internet sites in China, where brick-and-mortar retailing is still relatively underdeveloped, especially in the poorer regions of the country. Alibaba recently showed its commitment to sports by sponsoring a leading Chinese football club.
Some 620 million people in China are connected to the internet. Quoting iResearch, Alibaba said that only 7.9 percent of Chinese retail sales were made online in China last year and predicted compound annual average growth of 27.2 percent in online purchases through 2016.
Jack Ma, who founded Alibaba in an apartment in Hangzhou 15 years ago to connect Chinese manufacturers with foreign buyers, owns 8.9 percent of the company's shares. Yahoo acquired a 22.6 percent stake in the portal a year ago, merging its business in China into Alibaba.
