Weibo IPO Rises Above Drooping Expectations

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By Trey Thoelcke Published
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Ahead of its initial public offering (IPO), Weibo Corp. (NASDAQ: WB) both priced shares at the low end of its expected range of $17 to $19 apiece, and it reduced the number of shares offered to 16.8 million American depositary shares (ADSs) from 20 million.

Weibo opened even lower, at about $16.27 per share, when trading started around noon. But they quickly shot up to $19.46. That gave the company a market cap of about $3.5 billion. The market value of rival Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) is more than $2.5 billion.

This offering comes ahead of the highly anticipated IPO of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which holds stake in Weibo. Alibaba is expected to raise about $15 billion in what could be the biggest Internet IPO since that of Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) in 2012.

Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse acted as joint book runners for the Weibo IPO. The underwriting syndicate was given a 30-day overallotment option to purchase up to 2.52 million additional ADSs from Weibo.

As of March 2014, Weibo claimed to have 143.8 million monthly average users and 66.6 million daily average users. The company also said that more than 70% of its monthly average users in December 2013 accessed Weibo from mobile devices at least once during the month.

Weibo shares were trading at $19.05, or up more than 12%, after about 45 minutes of trading. Almost 14 million shares had traded hands.

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Photo of Trey Thoelcke
About the Author Trey Thoelcke →

Trey has been an editor and author at 24/7 Wall St. for more than a decade, where he has published thousands of articles analyzing corporate earnings, dividend stocks, short interest, insider buying, private equity, and market trends. His comprehensive coverage spans the full spectrum of financial markets, from blue-chip stalwarts to emerging growth companies.

Beyond 24/7 Wall St., Trey has created and edited financial content for Benzinga and AOL's BloggingStocks, contributing additional hundreds of articles to the investment community. He previously oversaw the 24/7 Climate Insights site, managing editorial operations and content strategy, and currently oversees and creates content for My Investing News.

Trey's editorial expertise extends across multiple publishing environments. He served as production editor at Dearborn Financial Publishing and development editor at Kaplan, where he helped shape financial education materials. Earlier in his career, he worked as a writer-producer at SVE. His freelance editing portfolio includes work for prestigious clients such as Sage Publications, Rand McNally, the Institute for Supply Management, the American Library Association, Eggplant Literary Productions, and Spiegel.

Outside of financial journalism, Trey writes fiction and has been an active member of the writing community for years, overseeing a long-running critique group and moderating workshop sessions at regional conventions. He lives with his family in an old house in the Midwest.

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