Pinterest IPO raises $1.4 billion as it shuns social-media tag

Bloomberg

Pinterest Inc.’s message to investors was don’t compare us to social media or a search engine. The outcome was that it raised about $1.4 billion in an above-range initial public offering.
Pinterest operates in a crowded digital marketing space, where Google and Facebook Inc. get the lion’s share of ad dollars, and a smattering of smaller platforms like Twitter Inc. and Snap Inc. get the rest. The San Francisco-based company, which serves as a sort of digital bulletin board for pictures and ideas for furniture, fashion, weddings, recipes and more, has a direct line to millions of people who are looking for specific things to buy. That may give it an edge in making money from its user base compared with some of its peers.
Chief Executive Officer Ben Silbermann likes to project a more virtuistic, less competitive vision of Pinterest, but investors will still be scrutinising its advertising model. There are a lot of options to place bets on hot technology companies: Ride-hailing company Lyft Inc. made its debut this month and Uber Technologies Inc. is likely to list its shares in May. Videoconferencing company Zoom Video Communications Inc. raised $751 million in its IPO and will begin trading along with Pinterest.
Other high-profile companies considering going public include Slack Technologies Inc., Postmates Inc., Palantir Technologies Inc. and Airbnb Inc. Pinterest sold 75 million shares for $19 each, after marketing them for $15 to $17, according to a statement. Based on the number of Class A and B shares outstanding after the offer, as detailed in a regulatory filing, Pinterest’s IPO price would value it at about $10.1 billion.
Including restricted stock and options, the IPO values the San Francisco-based company at about $12.7 billion, said a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because those details weren’t public. Pinterest’s last valuation, from a private funding round in 2017, was $12.3 billion.
The offering was led by Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Allen & Co. Pinterest will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol PINS.

UBER NEXT
The listing is the second biggest in the US so far this year, after Lyft’s $2.34 billion IPO and ahead of Tradeweb Markets Inc.’s $1.24 billion offer. Uber will seek to raise about $10 billion in an offering valuing it at about $100 billion, people familiar with its plans have said.
Zoom, which boosted its share price to $36 from an already elevated range of $33 to $35, is a rare example of a profitable tech startup launching a public listing.
The listing values the company at more than $9 billion.
Pinterest has taken a slow and steady approach to growth and making money from the service, compared with the faster expansion rates of Facebook, Twitter, and Snap when they went public. Analysts expect revenue will likely come more from squeezing additional ad dollars from the base of users Pinterest already has, rather than growing its total audience.
Despite Pinterest’s efforts to distance itself from the label of a “social media company”, analysts say it can be a useful benchmark for valuation. According to James Cordwell, an analyst at Atlantic Equities, Pinterest is worth as much as Snap, about $16 billion, and could be much more.