At the very last minute of its IPO, Sonos cut the starting price of its shares to $15 per after originally intending to price them in a range of $17-19. This indicates that demand for the stock was lower than expected. The company disclosed its plan to go public on July 6th, and afterwards also said that it planned to raise up to $263.9 million - not including an over-allotment to underwriters. After selling 13.9 million shares at $15 a piece, the company has raised $208.5 million. Sonos trades under the ticker symbol "SONO" and the lead underwriters are Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) and Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS).
Sonos one of the traditional speaker makers such as Bose and Samsung (KRX: 005930). Sonos markets its high-end, web-connected speakers to music fans as the industry is continually moving towards smart assistants made by Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL). The company has a reported net loss of $14.2 million on revenue of $992.5 million in its most recent fiscal year. This is an improvement from fiscal 2016, when the company experienced a loss of $38.2 million on sales of $901.3 million.
Regardless, Sonos is also one of the few recent IPOs to ho experience a rising one-day chart - shares continued to rise above $20 even in after-trading hours. At the offer price, Sonos is valued at just below $1.5 billion. In April, MarketWatch said that Sonos could be worth as much as $3 billion as a public company.
Is it the stock, or did the company just choose a bad time to issue an IPO? This is especially pertinent question after considering that NASDAQ experienced some rocky times recently. Valuation in the tech sector was questionable following disappointing results from companies such as Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) and Twitter (NYSE: TWTR).