GoDaddy Shares Shoot Higher after the IPO

GoDaddy (GDDY: NYSE), a leading provider of domains and website hosting went public last week. The company made its trading debut last Wednesday morning in the higher than expected range and share price jumped 30 percent in the opening minutes of trading. At the time of this article, GoDaddy shares are currently up 1.2 percent in after-market trading hours at $26.50.

GoDaddy raised more than $460 million dollars and the initial public offering (IPO) was valued at $4 billion. The lead book runners for the deal were Morgan Stanley and Citigroup (C: NYSE).

It should be noted that this is not the first time GoDaddy tried to go public. The company, founded in 1997, field an S-1 with the SEC in May 2006 but withdrew the registration within three months of filing. GoDaddy said they stopped due to market conditions and they did not need to go public at that time. In an interview with Forbes, CEO and co-founder Bob Parsons stated that in 2006 that the “quiet Period that came along with the IPO filing has been suffocating.” He withdrew the filing at that time. Parsons stepped aside as CEO in 2011 but saw his net worth increase to $2.1 billion thanks to the IPO on Wednesday. The current CEO of the company is Blake Irving.

GoDaddy was purchased by KKR and Silver Lake Partners in 2011 for #2.25 billion. They filed for this IPO in June 2014. GoDaddy boasts 13 million customers around the globe and over 59 million registered domain names. It had $1.4 billion in revenue in 2014, a 23 percent increase from 2013.

The GoDaddy IPO follows a quiet first quarter for US IPOs in 2015. There were only 34 IPOs for that quarter. The biggest IPO of that quarter was BOX (BOX: NYSE) whose shares have since fallen 18 percent.