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Groupon (NASDAQ:GRPN) has now finalized its IPO offer price at $20 per share: way above expectations. This would bring in $680 million, and value Groupon at a staggering $12.6 billion. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers are forever blowing bubbles.
Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. Not to mention: The iPhone 5 release date Lemmings app, IRL...
Kara Swisher reports:
The offering for the Chicago-based daily deals site...a controversial IPO...was well upward of 10 times oversubscribed. ... Groupon has endured an unusual amount of criticism over a variety of issues...accounting treatments, executive turmoil and growth prospects. But investors did not seem to mind.
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Executives from Groupon...have been hawking the company which sells...discounted services from...local merchants to investors all over the country. ... The company is set to go public tomorrow.
Colleen Taylor adds:
The share price will give Groupon an overall market capitalization of $12.6 billion, well above the projections [of] some Wall Street analysts.
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[This] could be a very interesting day for people in both the tech and financial spheres. Groupon is only offering...5.4 percent of the companys 637.3 million shares.
But Chikodi Chima utters the B-word:
Groupons core business of selling local deals is slumping. ... The trend of slower local sales has been obscured by product expansions. ... Groupon desperately needs to raise cash.
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People have been watching...very closely for echoes of last decades dot-com bubble, when companies with little or no revenue were listing themselves as public companies.
So Ryan Tate sounds suitably sarcastic:
[T]he tech bubble, inflated heretofore by private investment deals, is going public. How exciting.
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Groupon added 5 million shares to its...offering to help meet the demand. ... That's a lot of appetite for an unprofitable company with bizarro accounting, frighteningly large liabilities, and well documented retention problems. Of course, none of that matters...now that financial regulators have done...due diligence, and...Goldman Sachs has put its good name behind the sale.
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Those are...encouraging signs for this basically bulletproof investment, signs that have never led anyone astray ever before. Buy! Buy! Buy!
