Shares of Reddit skyrocketed in the social media firm’s first day on the New York Stock Exchange, as the most notable initial public offering of 2024 encountered a hungry market.
Key Takeaways
- Reddit’s stock rose almost 60% to about $54 per share within 16 minutes of going live on the New York Stock Exchange at about 1:15 p.m. Thursday.
- Reddit’s market capitalization accordingly rose to about $8.5 billion, having opened with a $6.4 billion valuation at its $34 per share IPO.
Key Background
Founded in 2005, Reddit is a wide-spanning social media platform where mostly anonymous users interact on more than 100,000 “subreddits,” or online forums for interests spanning from retail investing to education to pornography.
The most anticipated IPO of 2024, $748 million was raised in the IPO, a sum only outranked by three U.S.-listed debutantes last year in semiconductor chip designer Arm Holdings, Johnson & Johnson spinoff Kenvue and sandal king Birkenstock. Stocks tend to be highly volatile during their first day on the public market. Shares of the five most notable stateside IPOs of 2023—Arm, Kenvue, Birkenstock, grocery deliverer Instacart and marketing automation firm Klaviyo – each moved 9% or more during their debuts.
Reddit, which has a global monthly active user base of about 500 million, is the first social media company to go public since Pinterest did so in 2019, and joins Snapchat parent Snap and Instagram and Facebook parent Meta as some of the few social media firms traded publicly after X, the company formerly known as Twitter, went private in October 2022. Other than the trillion-dollar Meta, social media companies have garnered mixed results on Wall Street.
Pinterest shares are about 80% above their IPO price as the company has a roughly $24 billion valuation, still underperforming the S&P 500’s return over the same period, Snap shares trade about 50% below their 2017 IPO price with a $19 billion market cap and Twitter stock was roughly flat from its 2013 IPO until 2022, ahead of Elon Musk’s controversial purchase of the company.
Tangent
Reddit’s IPO comes at an opportune time, as all three major U.S, stock indexes registered all-time highs Thursday morning. The Reddit listing comes a day after the explosive debut of artificial intelligence player Astera Labs, which tallied the best first day of trading for a U.S. company valued at over $500 million in nearly three years, according to Bloomberg.
Surprising Fact
Reddit’s $8.5 billion market cap is about 20% shy of the more than $10 billion valuation it fetched on the private market in 2010.
Contra
The company’s headline financials offer little meat to investors, as it reported a $140 million loss on $804 million of revenue in 2023. “It’s hard to look past an 18-year-old company that’s still unprofitable,” Bernstein analysts Mark Shmulik and Nikhil Devnani wrote to clients last week. But Reddit is a “unique asset,” noted the Bernstein group, as there’s potential that Reddit is simply “undermonetized” as it reports strong advertising revenue growth and teases the potential for AI-related sales.
This article was first published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
