Investors had their eyes on the Bay Area on Thursday, as Pinterest and Zoom Video Communications became the latest of the region's companies to get join the IPO caravan and make their public debuts to enthusiasm on Wall Street.
Pintererst, the image-sharing and information company that has made a name by allowing people to "pin" images and links of things they find and like online, started trading at $23.75 a share, a 25 percent increase over its IPO price of $19 a share. With its IPO off and running, and 75 million shares on the market, San Francisco-based Pinterest raised $1.43 billion and watched its valuation climb to nearly $16 billion.
Clement Thibault, senior analyst at Investing.com, said he was skeptical about Pinterest's growth prospects in the United States. However, he said there is one quality that Pinterest does have in its favor as a newly public company.
"Pinterest is on its way to profitability," Thibault said. "(Which is) something we can't say about many big IPOs. So, it's definitely got some good things going for it, and it could be a buy when the IPO craze runs its course."
San Jose, Calif.-based Zoom performed even better, as the cloud-based conferencing technology company's shares surged more than 80 percent, to $65 each. Zoom initially priced 20.9 million shares of its stock at $36 a piece Wednesday night. The initial reaction sent Zoom's valuation to $16 billion, which blew past the $1 billion the company was valued at in 2017 when it last took in private financing.
Speaking from the Nasdaq Market Site, Kelly Steckelberg, Zoom's chief financial officer, said the day was a "milestone for the company."
"We'd been working toward this for a while," Steckelberg said. "Our financial results were good. There was a lot of demand and interest during our investor roadshow. The market conditions were great, and everything kind of just all came together."
The public debuts of Pinterest and Zoom were expected to be closely watched as gauges of investors' appetites toward what is expected to be a year of tech-related IPOs.
Lyft kicked off the latest round of IPO mania when, on March 29, the ride-hailing company went public at a price of $72 a share, and rose almost 9 percent to end its first day as public company at $78.29. However, Lyft has since seen Wall Street turn against it, as the company's shares were down to $58.46 in Thursday's trading session.
And anticipation is expected to continue to grow in advance of Uber's upcoming IPO, which is set to take place next month. That public offering is expected to dwarf all others this year, and could set Uber up with a valuation of $100 billion.
.png?w=600)
