Salesforce.com Prices Offering Higher Than Forecast
Salesforce.com priced its initial public offering of 10 million shares at $11 a share, its underwriters said Tuesday.
The price was higher than the company’s estimate of $7.50 to $8.50 a share, providing the latest sign of investors’ renewed interest in taking risks on young companies.
Salesforce.com’s shares are scheduled to begin trading today on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol CRM -- a reference to the “customer relationship management” software made by the company.
The IPO will culminate Salesforce.com’s drawn-out journey to the stock market. The San Francisco-based company filed its IPO plans six months ago, with hopes of going public in the spring.
The offering bogged down, though, after regulators required the company to change the way it accounted for sales commissions issues. Another hurdle arose after the firm’s colorful chief executive, Marc Benioff, discussed the software business with the New York Times in a story published in May.
The article prompted Salesforce.com to delay the offering to avoid running afoul of securities laws requiring a “quiet period” leading up to a company’s IPO.
Investors’ willingness to pay more for Salesforce.com’s shares marks the latest bullish sign in a resurgent IPO market.
IPOs of two biotech companies that sold shares Monday began trading on Tuesday and rose sharply on Nasdaq. Momenta Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Mass. gained $1.31 to $7.81; La Jolla-based Senomyx was up 75 cents to $6.75.
However, both companies had sold shares at prices below where they had hoped.
As of Tuesday, 72 IPOs had been priced this year, surpassing the 68 deals completed last year, according to Renaissance Capital, a Greenwich, Conn.-based firm that tracks the market. At the same time last year, only six IPOs had made it through the pipeline, raising a total of $1.1 billion, Renaissance Capital said. This year’s IPOs already have raised $14.4 billion.
“The professional [investors] are back, but the individual investors still haven’t returned,” said Kathleen Smith, a Renaissance Capital analyst.
