Menlo Park’s WeWork shares jump on debut after two-year struggle to go public



by   |  VIEW 811

Menlo Park’s WeWork shares jump on debut after two-year struggle to go public

Shares’ prices of WeWork, the Menlo Park, California-headquartered shared workspace provider, had soared as much as 9 per cent at its US capital market debut later last week, bailing out a bumpy ride to go public following two years of struggle.

In point of fact, back in the mid-2019s, WeWork had expressed intent to a public market floatation in the United States, however, the storied office sharing company’s investors had expressed deep discontents over the plan and WeWork had botched to branch a way through to the IPOs.

Though, in a histrionic move to jailbreak the money draining office sharing company, Japanese tech investment conglomerate SoftBank Corp had purchased about 79 per cent stake in the company back in late-2019, while SoftBank had to proffer a substantial upsum to prod the company co-founder Adam Neumann to step down as the Chief of the start-up.

Two years after such IPO waggishness in WeWork, which had still been contemplated as the first loss-making move from SoftBank’s Son, WeWork current Chair alongside SoftBank executive Marcelo Claure was quoted saying that the worst might be over for the office-space sharing company, however, WeWork had yet to turn profitable and it was losing nearly a Dollar for every 100 cents in profits.

WeWork shares’ jump on debt

In tandem, following a two-year long drama that had witnessed WeWork’s valuation downsizing to an $8 billion from a jawdropping $47 billion, shares’ prices of WeWork that went public via a merger with an SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company), BowX Acquistion Corp., ended the week 11.38 per cent higher to $13.02 apiece.

Meanwhile, addressing to a brighter outlook for WeWork shares, an IPO expert and a professor at the University of Florida, Jay Ritter said, “WeWork has a low occupancy rate, 55-58% recently, and thus can grow revenue without increasing costs by very much.

It needs to grow revenue, because it is currently losing close to $1 for every dollar of revenue that it brings in”.