Jack Dorsey about to go on stage at a recent TechCrunch Disrupt event
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s mobile payments platform Square has priced its forthcoming IPO at $9 a share, valuing the company at around $2.9bn. This is less than the $11 and $13 per share analysts had expected the price to be.
Investors had been hoping Square would be valued at as much as $6bn.
It is understood the company is planning to dilute its own shares by offering extra stock to investors who backed the company at the higher price.
Square is due to IPO tomorrow (20 November) on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “SQ”.
Square was founded by Twitter co-founder and its newly–appointed CEO Jack Dorsey in 2009 to enable anybody with a mobile device to accept card payments anywhere and at any time.
By 2014, sellers from businesses of all sizes had processed some $23.8bn from 446m card payments made with 144m cards.
During the first half of 2015, Square reported revenues of $560.6m and a loss of $77.6m compared with revenues of $371.9m and a loss of $79.4m a year earlier.
Dorsey holds a 24.4pc stake in Square with the next largest shareholder being Khosla Ventures with a 17.3pc stake and co-founder James McKelvey has a 9.4pc stake. Other shareholders include JPMC Strategic Investments, Sequoia Capital and Rizvi Traverse.
Jack Dorsey image by Max Morse via Creative Commons/Flickr
