The stock market had a rough Thursday, but Dropbox is looking ahead to Friday’s trading, when it will officially become a public company with an opening price higher than the company had forecast.
The magic number is $21, according to reports from CNBC and The Wall Street Journal. Early in the IPO process, Dropbox said it expected to list its shares on the Nasdaq between $16 and $18 a share, and later revised that range upwards to $18 to $20 a share.
At $21, Dropbox will raise around $700 million and carry a valuation of around $8 billion, which is still below the valuation it was awarded during its last private financing round but better than some had initially feared. The cloud file storage company is unprofitable, but still growing at a healthy rate, and it has plans to expand into other areas of the enterprise software market.
It might seem like a bad time to go public, given the stock market’s jittery nerves ahead of a huge vote on a federal spending bill and the illogical trade war that appears to be around the corner. But reports throughout the IPO process have suggested that Dropbox is seeing a lot of demand for its shares among institutional investors, and that might be enough to carry it against the tide of the overall market, at least for a while.
