On Thursday, September 20, Eventbrite made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange, and it got off to a fantastic start. Initially, shares of the stock were priced at $23 per share, but shares shot up nearly 60% in day trading to a final price of nearly $37 a share. The huge increase in price let to a new company valuation of over $3 billion, a $1.2 billion gain from the original $1.8 billion valuations.
As a whole, Eventbrite is a US-based event management and ticketing website. The company was started back in 2006 by Kevin and Julia Hartz. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California and has more than 500 employees located in offices in both San Francisco and Nashville, as well as eight other offices in countries around the world. What Eventbrite offers is a service that allows users to browse, create, or promote events in their area; in turn, the company charges a small service fee for event organizers to provide online ticketing for the event.
The huge increase in stock price comes as a surprise to some experts as their financial performance has not been positive for the past two years. Since 2016, the company has only been losing money. They posted officials losses of nearly $40 million for both 2016 and 2017. Through the first six months of 2018, losses have been over $15 million. While the company is trying to account for the loses through the introduction of a new pricing scheme, investors are unsure if it is enough. Eventbrite has reported that they expected revenue to continue to rise this year, which could help to offset the losses. In 2016, revenue figures were at $133 million and in 2017, they were at $201 million. Last year alone, Eventbrite produced tickets for more than 3 million events across 170 countries. Eventbrite also said that they expect that their platform will help sell more than 1 billion tickets this year alone.
The Eventbrite IPO is another tech public offering which has seen great success in the last twelve months. Also riding that trend is streaming-TV device maker Roku, online-storage provider and repository Dropbox, wireless-speaker manufacturer Sonos, and streaming-music company Spotify. With the public offerings of these major tech companies, this past year has been one of the strongest for IPOs in recent history. According to Dealogic, 120 companies have staged IPOs in the first half of this year and have succeeded in raising more than $35 billion. Not many tech companies are projected for IPOs the remainder of this year, besides the online-survey software SurveyMonkey.
