Author: Kate Conger and Michael J. de la Merced / Source: New York Times
Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — Uber expects to be worth as much as $91 billion when it starts selling shares next month, making its initial public offering one of the largest in the history of the technology industry.
With its amended prospectus, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, the ride-hailing company is kicking off the last stage of its journey to list on the public stock markets. The offering is expected to mint a new generation of Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires.
Uber set a price range of $44 to $50 a share, putting its valuation at $80 billion to $91 billion, accounting for stock options and restricted stock. That number could change depending on investor appetite for the shares over the next two weeks.
At that valuation, Uber would dwarf its rival Lyft, which went public last month at a valuation of more than $24 billion — but it would place the company behind Facebook, which went public in 2012 with a market capitalization of $104 billion, and the Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba, which was valued at $168 billion in its 2014 offering.
Uber said that it planned to sell 180 million shares in the offering, which could raise up to $9 billion.
The company was last appraised at $76 billion in a private fund-raising in August. Its offering price will not be firmed up until the day before it lists its shares.
Uber’s offering is a milestone for “unicorns,” young companies that were privately valued at $1 billion or more. Many of these businesses grew quickly, riding a wave of technology like smartphones, but few have demonstrated they can make money. Uber is deeply unprofitable, as is Lyft.
Such losses have caused jitters on Wall Street: Lyft’s shares now trade below their offering price, for instance. That may have prompted Uber to take a more conservative approach to the stock market.
[Read more: Who’ll get rich when the “unicorns” go public? ]
The filing on Friday confirms that Uber is not expected to make a profit anytime soon. The company said that it lost up to $1.1 billion in the first three months of this year. In the same period a year earlier, Uber had a $3.7 billion profit, which reflected one-time gains, including asset sales.
Using a nonstandard accounting measure that strips out those one-off items as well…
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