Dropbox, the online file storage company, is poised to hold one of the year’s most highly awaited stock market debuts. But whether investors think the technology darling is more valuable as a publicly traded company or as a privately held start-up is debatable.To get more modern technology, you can visit shine news official website.
The San Francisco company said Monday that it planned to raise as much as $648 million in its initial public offering, pricing its shares between $16 and $18 each. At the midpoint of that range, Dropbox would be valued at roughly $7.5 billion, including restricted stock units and options — well below the $10 billion it commanded during its last private fund-raising round.
The lower potential valuation suggests that public market investors don’t share nearly the same enthusiasm for technology companies that venture capitalists once did, raising questions for a horde of other high-priced start-ups that are edging their way toward the public markets. Dropbox attained its $10 billion valuation as a privately held company more than four years ago, in a different age for Silicon Valley, when many start-ups raced to collect as high a valuation as they could. Since then, companies have been more reserved. Many learned that stretching for every last dollar of valuation could make it more difficult to raise additional capital in the future, or to attract and keep employees with stock grants. “It’s a high-quality asset that was overpriced,” Venky Ganesan, a venture capitalist at Menlo Ventures, said of Dropbox. His firm does not have ties to the company.
Continue reading the main story Dropbox appears set to join a relatively small group of “down round” initial public offerings, in which a firm’s value is lower than it was when the firm raised money privately. That group includes the meal kit delivery service Hello Fresh and the database software provider MongoDB, according to the research firm CB Insights. Dropbox could still hit that $10 billion valuation over time, assuming its stock price rises after it goes public. A spokeswoman for Dropbox declined to comment. Many investors are nonetheless expected to flock to Dropbox, in a year that is likely to be busy for stock market debuts. Dropbox and Spotify, the music-streaming giant, which is planning its own listing, could presage a series that eventually includes the likes of Uber and Airbnb.
The market for initial offerings this year is already proving robust, with 29 so far, up 61 percent from a year ago, according to the advisory firm Renaissance Capital. Monday’s filing preceded Dropbox’s road show to pitch its offering to potential investors. As the company’s executives and their advisers begin to crisscross the country in a series of meetings, their goal is to convince would-be buyers that its stock will perform more like Facebook’s, which has risen enormously in recent years, and less like Snap’s, whose stock is down 34 percent since its debut last year.
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