Its stock closed at $ 144.71 on the Nasdaq stock exchange, up 113% from its IPO price.
At this level, including the securities granted to employees, Airbnb is valued at around $ 100 billion on the stock market according to Bloomberg.
The spread of the pandemic in the United States in the spring had marked a halt for companies wishing to rub shoulders with the markets.
But stock market life has since picked up and investors are showing a voracious appetite for the new arrivals.
On Wednesday, the door-to-door grocery and meal delivery boy DoorDash had already stormed Wall Street, soaring 86%.
Airbnb had originally planned to market its shares at a price range of $ 44 to $ 50 per unit, a range raised a few days later to $ 56-60, before climbing to $ 68 on Wednesday night.
The level of the stock, which trades under the symbol “ABNB”, continued to explode on Thursday morning as brokers and bankers tried to assess investor interest as accurately as possible, and finally started the listing at 146 dollars.
For the occasion, the Nasdaq has displayed the platform’s logo and images of its activity on its facade overlooking the legendary Times Square in New York.
After the charges were deducted, the company recovered $ 3.4 billion in new money from the transaction.
‘Rise of a giant’
Founded 13 years ago in San Francisco, the company has revolutionized the business travel and tourism industry.
Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were looking in 2007 for a way to pay their rent and then created a site, called AirBedandBreakfast.com, to offer conference participants to accommodate them on air mattresses.
The two friends were joined in 2008 by computer scientist Nathan Blecharczyk and officially formed Airbnb.
As a serious financial crisis spreads around the world, the idea of finding cheaper temporary accommodation, or of earning a little money by renting a room, quickly wins over the public.
The rental platform has encountered resistance along the way, several municipalities and hoteliers worrying about seeing private housing turn de facto into hotels, depriving individuals of homes, promoting real estate speculation and creating a shortfall for the traditional hotel sector.
But the group now has four million hosts on its counter and more than 825 million customers.
The platform was hit hard by sanitary measures imposed around the world in the winter and last spring – its turnover for the first nine months of 2020 has plunged 32% year on year.
The company had to urgently raise $ 2 billion to deal with the crisis and lay off around 25% of its employees.
This allowed him to raise his head during the summer vacation: from July to September, the platform earned $ 219 million.
Airbnb in particular benefited from the appetite for long weekends and vacations nearby, as well as the desire of people to telecommute from a place other than their home.
By buying shares of the site, investors feel they are banking on the rise of a new giant in its sector, notes Gregori Volokhine, portfolio manager for Meeschaert Financial Services.
“People are currently afraid of going to hotels, public places, there is a real appetite for rentals in individual places,” he told AFP. “And the competition, like (the site) Expedia, is way behind.”
The simple fact that Airbnb manages to generate quarterly profits can also be an asset on Wall Street, where many companies in the sharing economy, like Uber, have gone public without ever making a profit.
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