MOUNTAIN VIEW — Coupons.com stock more than doubled during its first day of trading on Wall Street, as investors continued to show a taste for traditional discounting models in a high-tech world.
The company sold its first batch of 10.5 million shares at $16 apiece, pricing the stock higher than the $12-$14 range Coupons.com originally expected, to bring in $168 million at a valuation approaching $1.2 billion. That price apparently wasn’t high enough for Wall Street investors: Shares opened at $27.15 Friday morning on the New York Stock Exchange and climbed from there, moving as high as $33 before closing at $30, an 87.5 percent increase that left the company with a market cap exceeding $2 billion.
“Clearly, the investors are very happy, the market’s happy, the employee base is really happy; most importantly I think our clients are really happy,” founder and CEO Stephen Boal said Friday.
Founded during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, Mountain View-based Coupons.com took three years to launch its first digital coupon, in 2001, and is now moving to mobile devices in a fight with the mailbox circulars and newspaper inserts that have dominated thrifty customers’ lives for decades.
While Groupon and LivingSocial made a big splash after debuting a new-school approach to discounts, their models face doubts, and more traditional cost-cutting approaches that have translated to digital now seem to be more popular among investors. RetailMeNot, which offers a collection of coupon codes for use in online shopping, went public at $21 a share in July, and closed Friday at more than double that price, $43.60, giving the Austin, Texas, company a market cap of $2.6 billion. Meanwhile, Groupon closed at $8.60 Friday and has stayed lower than $13 for the past calendar year after debuting at $20 a share in 2011.
“Groupon and Living Social are focused on very few categories, very specific deals, a lot of service-oriented coupons,” Swagbucks CEO Josef Gorowitz said Friday. “We’re able to bring savings across the traditional consumer behavior. Every mom going to the grocery store, every techie buying their tech products, we’re able to bring savings to much more of a mainstream consumer than the niche consumer looking to get a massage at a discounted price.”
Gorowitz’s company offers rewards for consumers shopping or performing other actions online, the dot-com equivalent to rewards cards that retailers have been handing out for decades. He said in a phone interview Friday that his El Segundo-based company and Coupons.com also have a strong growth trajectory due to the growth of mobile products, an important focus for investors.
“If you’re actually in a grocery store and a specific brand wants to push their products, such as through iBeacon, which Apple has brought to market, you can actually ping that consumer when they’re in a specific aisle and offer them a coupon when they’re standing close to that product. That’s a revolution.”
Coupons.com has focused on expanding its mobile efforts, with apps that have been downloaded 7 million times.
“We do anticipate that mobile will grow at a faster rate” than the traditional desktop platform, Boal said Friday in a telephone interview.
The company’s revenues jumped in 2013, gaining nearly 50 percent from $112.1 million in 2012 to $167.9 million; while still unprofitable, the company’s losses shrank last year as well, from a net loss of $59.2 million in 2012 to $11.2 million.
Coupons.com sold all the shares in the IPO, with the proceeds targeted to general corporate purposes. Underwriters Goldman Sachs, Allen, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and RBC Capital Markets have the option of purchasing an additional 1.575 million shares at the IPO price.
CEO Boal will own 9.3 percent of the company after the offering, with investors Passport Ventures (19.5 percent) and T. Rowe Price (10.1 percent) also owning substantial stakes.
Contact Jeremy C. Owens at 408-920-5876; follow him at Twitter.com/jowens510.
