Etsy set for $267-million IPO, stock market debut Thursday
Etsy Chief Executive Chad Dickerson has positioned the online shopping website as a nontraditional tech start-up. Now nearly a decade old, the company is set to go public Thursday.
Online shopping marketplace Etsy is scheduled to debut on the stock market Thursday after raising $267 million in the technology industry’s third major initial public offering of stock this year.
Etsy announced Wednesday afternoon that it has finalized its IPO price at $16 a share, the upper limit of a predicted range. The price values the company at $1.78 billion.
Etsy’s arrival on Nasdaq is being closely followed in the tech world for a number of reasons. The decision to go public has led to fresh scrutiny about whether the trinkets, clothing and other craft goods that people sell on Etsy are truly homemade. The small-scale approach has been Etsy’s crucial separator from EBay, Amazon and other online services.
Tech IPOs have also slowed down compared with a booming 2014 that included the stock market debuts of Alibaba, GoPro and GrubHub. Start-ups are staying private longer because mutual funds, hedge funds and other traditional public-market investors are showering them with money. Yet Etsy, at about 10 years old, is at a mature age for start-ups and is facing scrutiny over whether it is going public too soon.
Etsy’s revenue came in at $196 million in 2014, more than doubling from $75 million in 2012. But it’s still not profitable. The net loss was $15 million in 2014.
The offering also includes a unique element: Etsy set aside 5% of shares for sale to its users and other individuals.
The other closely followed tech IPOs this year have been for online storage company Box and website services firm GoDaddy.
Twitter: @peard33
