Start them up!
Wall St. debuts for 7 companies this week
THE TIMING could have probably been a bit better, considering Friday’s huge stock market slide.
But no less than seven organizations made their debuts as publicly traded companies in what’s amounting to a record year for initial public offerings.
There have been nearly 290 IPOs that have raised more than $95 billion so far in 2014, according to the EY Global IPO Trends report released this week.
That’s a 27% jump and a 54% rise in capital from 2013, EY Global said.
A recent report from accounting firm CohnReznick projected IPO activity in 2014 will exceed 300 deals, the highest level since at least 2000, according to the firm.
“Most, if not all of these companies that have announced IPOs in the past year are backed by venture capital and private equity firms,” David Goldin, CEO of AmeriMerchant, a provider of working capital solutions for small businesses, told the Daily News.
“It’s the natural evolution of the business cycle for these investors to seek out a liquidity event. Given the massive growth and future upside of these companies, an IPO provides that liquidity for these companies and their investors.”
While tech companies have been the hot sector for new investments — four of the seven that went public Friday were technology firms, and the biggest IPO of the year belonged to Chinese e-retailer Alibaba — the alternative lending industry is getting plenty of investor attention after LendingClub, the peer-to-peer loan marketplace, began trading Thursday and saw its shares soar 56% above its opening price.
LendingClub, which closed up another 6% Friday, to $24.84, will be followed next week by the market debut of OnDeck Capital, a Manhattan-based financial tech firm that provides loans to small and mediumsized businesses.
The winners and losers among Friday’s freshly minted firms included Hortonworks, the Palo Alto-based tech company behind the popular Hadoop software used by Facebook and Amazon, which opened at $24 and closed at $26.38, up 65%.
Cloud software provider New Relic was up 48%, to $33.99.
Insurance company James River Group Holdings rose 1% to $21.25, while health data provider Connecture, formerly known as SimplyHealth.com, was up 10%, to $8.80.
Financial software firm Workiva fell nearly 2%, to $13.75.
Avolon, an Irish aircraft leasing company, fell 7.5% to close at $18.50.