Pandora Makes an IPO Fortune
It's probably wildly overvalued, so don't buy the stock. But if you're a happy Pandora customer, you can cheer the news that the magical online radio service's IPO went well today. Three billion dollars well.
That's what the public market has valued Pandora at on the company's first day of trading. Despite the lofty valuation, Pandora will glean only about $234 million from its IPO, since it sold only part of the company and since the stock appreciated significantly from its initial price. Still, that's about twice what the company had initially hoped to walk away with. Not bad for a company that bleeds cash and that today was called "probably... absurdly overvalued" by Henry Blodget, the influential blog editor who was a bullish stock analyst during the last dot com bubble.
Even though it has steadily reduced its losses, Pandora is still a financial mess whose future profitability is tied up with the whims of the record companies. So it's not a wise place to park your retirement savings. But if you're one of the addictive service's 90 million happy listeners, you can take comfort in the fact that the company, which has been scraping by since the late 1990s, has a new lease on life.
[Photo via AP]