by Scott Denne
Amid a short burst of high-profile tech IPOs, enterprise offerings are soaring, while consumer-focused companies are getting a less-bullish reception. In their public debuts, both Zoom Video and Pinterest priced above their range and traded up from there. The former, a video-conferencing specialist, reaped a hefty valuation increase in its debut. The social networking vendor, however, stayed just above its last private funding.
To be sure, Pinterest hardly received a bearish reception. It began trading at about $24 per share, for a 25% bump, bringing it slightly up from the price of its series H round in 2017. Currently, Pinterest is valued at $13bn, or nearly 16x trailing sales. Zoom, by comparison, jumped 75% from its IPO price when it entered the Nasdaq, garnering a $16.2bn market cap, or 60x trailing sales.
The discrepancy between enterprise- and consumer-tech offerings isn’t limited to these two. Last month, Lyft made a lackluster debut – its shares now trade 20% below its initial price. A few days later, PagerDuty, an IT ops provider, jumped 60% when it hit the public markets. The comparative reliability of enterprise-tech stocks accounts for some of the discrepancy.
As we noted in our coverage of PagerDuty’s IPO, many of last year’s enterprise IPOs still trade at or near 20x revenue. And many of the past consumer unicorns have faltered – Snap’s shares have fallen more than half from its 2017 IPO and Blue Apron is practically a penny stock. Perhaps more importantly, the recent enterprise debutants left room in their cap table for a first-day bump, while consumer companies extracted all they could from private investors, at the highest price they could, before turning to the public markets. Zoom raised $160m on the way to its IPO, while Pinterest took in almost 10x that amount.