Groupon, the group discount website, has raised $700 million by launching on the NASDAQ stock exchange, in the largest Internet initial public offering (IPO) since Google’s in 2004.
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The $20 share price values the company, which has yet to turn a profit, at $12.7 billion. This is six times its predicted revenues for next year.
Local media analysts BIA/Kelsey recently predicted that the US daily deals market will be worth $2 billion this year, and will grow to $4 billion in 2015. Groupon is currently the market leader, with LivingSocial champing at its heels, but web giants including Google and Facebook have recently entered the market.
Groupon famously turned down a $6 billion acquisition bid from Google last year.
Founded in 2008, the company now boasts over 35 million registered users and has grown sales 110,000 times over in the last three years. To support that growth, Groupon has adopted an all-cloud IT strategy.
"We’re now in 45 countries around the world, and we got there in about a year and a half," Groupon’s UK head of CRM Arshid Mahmud told Information Age recently. "If it wasn’t for the cloud architecture we have in place, we could never have done that."
