Investors, start your engines: shares of domain-name peddler and NASCAR sponsor GoDaddy are off to the races, so to speak. The company made its public trading debut Wednesday morning, and after pricing its shares higher than the expected range, its stock has jumped 30% in its opening minutes on the market.
GoDaddy opened for trading at $26.15 per share Wednesday morning; it announced Tuesday night that it would offer 23 million shares at $20 per share, a higher price than the $17 to $19 per-share range announced in March. This price and share count mean that GoDaddy raised $460 million in its IPO and is valued at more than $4 billion.
The Scottsdale, Arizona-based company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker "GDDY."
As FORBES' Lauren Gensler reported last month, this IPO is not GoDaddy's first try at becoming a publicly-traded entity: the company, which was founded in 1997, filed an S-1 with the SEC in May 2006, but withdrew its registration just three months later. GoDaddy founder and then-CEO Bob Parsons wrote at the time that the withdrawal was due to market conditions, his feeling that GoDaddy didn't have to go public, and, interestingly, the quiet period that insiders must abide by in the time prior to the IPO. "If GoDaddy.com is anything, it is an outspoken company and I am an outspoken CEO," Parsons wrote in August 2006. "For us, the Quiet Period that came along with the IPO filing has been suffocating."
Parsons -- a billionaire whose net worth jumped to $2.1 billion Wednesday thanks to GoDaddy's stock market performance -- stepped down as CEO in 2011 and, evidently, the quiet period proved less suffocating for current chief executive Blake Irving.
GoDaddy was acquired by private equity firms KKR and Silver Lake Partners for $2.25 billion in 2011; it filed for this IPO in June 2014. The company says it now has 13 million customers worldwide and 59 million domain names under management. It recorded $1.4 billion in revenue in 2014, a 23% increase over sales recorded in 2013.
For all the domain names it manages, the company is perhaps best known for its provocative, often sexual Super Bowl ads. It hit a particularly strong nerve with this year's ad, which featured a puppy being sold online. Public outcry against the spot was so strong that GoDaddy pulled the ad from the big game.
GoDaddy's market debut follows a quiet first quarter of public offerings; during the first three months of 2015 there were just 34 IPOs. The most notable of these 34, tech company
Update, 4:10 pm ET: GoDaddy closed Wednesday trading exactly where it began, at $26.15 per share, giving the stock a 30.75% one-day pop.
