Airbnb was preparing Thursday to take its first steps on Wall Street after setting its IPO price at 68 dollars, a level noted several times in the face of the current investor appetite for new companies on the stock market.
The group said in a press release that it was able to recover about $ 3.4 billion through this transaction, once all costs have been deducted.
The operation values the housing rental platform at around $ 47 billion including the share of employees, according to American media.
Airbnb arrives in New York City the day after the door-to-door grocery and food delivery guy DoorDash stormed into the city.
While the IPO price of this start-up had been set at 102 dollars per share, after having already been raised several times, the title ended Wednesday at 189.51 dollars, up 86%.
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 have shown keen interest in new arrivals this year, such as cloud data storage (remote computing) group Snowflake and intelligence firm Palantir. in September.
Airbnb had initially 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 Wednesday night to $ 68.
The company, which has managed to raise the bar after a few difficult months at the start of the pandemic, will be listed on the Nasdaq trading platform under the symbol “ABNB”.
– Debut on air mattresses –
Founded 13 years ago in San Francisco, the company has revolutionized the business travel and tourism industry.
In 2007, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia looked for a way to pay their rent and created a site, called AirBedandBreakfast.com, to offer conference attendees 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 accommodation de facto transformed into hotels, depriving residents of housing, 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.
Airbnb’s valuation rose to $ 31 billion during a fundraiser in spring 2017 before falling to $ 18 billion in April, according to CNBC.
The group was then hit hard by the health measures imposed on the world in the winter and last spring – its turnover for the first nine months of 2020 plunged 32% over one 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.
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