This morning GoPro went public, spiking sharply in early trading. Priced at the upper end of its range, $24 per share, GoPro quickly traded higher, reaching nearly $33 per share, according to a Google Finance chart. As of writing, the company is trading for $31.07, up around 29 percent since its open.
By pricing high and enjoying a pop, GoPro could further loosen the IPO market by demonstrating that investors have a healthy appetite for shares of quickly growing firms.
GoPro, which enjoyed years of massive top-line expansion, saw its revenue and profits fall in its most recent quarter. Investors appear to be betting that quarter — a weak period for the U.S. economy as a whole — was a fluke, and that growth will resume.
GoPro has plans to become a media company in addition to a hardware firm, but those plans won’t generate material revenue in the current calendar year, it stated in its S-1 document.
Compared to other recent or proposed technology offerings, GoPro is a profitable firm. And I mean profitable in the GAAP sense. Another profitable firm that went public recently, Arista Networks, has also performed strongly since its debut.
MobileIron, a SaaS firm that is investing in quick growth but has large losses, has given up nearly all its IPO gains, and is up around $.027 above its debut price of $9 per share. It priced mid-range.
We’ll have our eyes on GoPro’s first publicly reported earnings to see what sort of growth it will post, but for today, being up 30 percent in a down-market day? The company can smile.
IMAGE BY FLICKR USER PETE PRODOEHL CC BY 2.0 LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)