Pinterest disclosed in a regulatory filing Monday that it plans to offer 75 million shares of Class A common stock at a price of between $15.00 and $17.00 per share. The price range values the company about $2 billion below its last valuation of $12 billion, when it sold pre-IPO shares to investors in 2017.
At the high end of the proposed price range, Pinterest would see a valuation of about $11.3 billion, accounting for restricted stock and stock options. The business is going public with a dual-class share structure, which seeks to concentrate voting power with Class B shareholders, including its co-founder and chief executive Benjamin Silbermann.
The company has named Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Allen & Co as the underwriters of its eagerly-awaited public offering. Shares of the San Francisco-based company will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange next week, using the ticker symbol “PINS.”
Pinterest is an online platform that allows users to share visually share and discover new content and ideas by “pinning” videos or images to their own or others’ boards (i.e. a grid of ‘pins’) and browsing what has been pinned by other users.
In its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Pinterest said that its revenue for the year ending Dec. 31, 2018, stood at $755.9 million, up from $472.8 million in calendar 2017. Net loss, on the other hand, dropped from $130 million in 2017 to $62.9 million in 2018. The company further revealed that monthly active users on its platform stood at 265 million at the end of last year.
Pinterest says in its filing that it competes “with larger, more established companies such as Amazon, Facebook (including Instagram), Google, Snap and Twitter, which provide their users with a variety of online products, services, content and advertising offerings, including web search engines, social networks and other means of discovering, using or acquiring goods and services. Many of these competitors have longer operating histories, significantly greater financial, technical, marketing and other resources and larger user bases than we do.”
Pinterest is the second out of the gates in a heavyweight class of highly valued tech companies joining the public domain. Lyft Inc. (NASDAQ: LYFT) recently became the first ride-hailing company to go public, though its shares have been on a small roller coaster ride since.
Lyft rival Uber Technologies Inc. is also expected to go public as soon as May, in what would be the biggest IPO ever. Postmates, Airbnb, and Slack are also among tech unicorns (startups valued at $1 billion or more) expected to become public companies this year.
