Top line
More than two years after the IPO plans were spectacularly revealed, WeWork began public trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, with shares rising after the merger with a special purpose vehicle.
The shares of coworking company WeWork soared on their first day of trading, making founder Adam Neumann … [+]
Important facts
Traded under the ticker “WE”, the WeWork share rose 13% on Thursday.
WeWork raised $ 1.3 billion by going public with blank check company BowX Acquisition Corp., led by Sacramento Kings owner and technology entrepreneur Vivek Ranadive, in a deal first announced in March.
The company’s valuation of roughly $ 9 billion is a sharp drop from 2019, when WeWork was valued at $ 47 billion by SoftBank Group during its initial efforts to go public this year.
As part of the transaction, SoftBank, which spent $ 10 billion to acquire an 80 percent stake in WeWork and save it from a liquidity crisis in October 2019, will retain its controlling stake in the company.
The records show WeWork is still losing money: $ 3.5 billion in 2019, $ 3.2 billion in 2020, and $ 2.1 billion in the first quarter of this year alone, including a cashless one Severance payment of around 500 million US dollars per year with former CEO Adam Neumann Financial Times Report.
WeWork has had sales of $ 3.2 billion each for the past two years (excluding its China operations, which it sold a majority stake in last year) and expects to do so, according to an investor presentation that BowX filed with the Securities and Exchange , in 2021 Commission.
However, the real estate and workplace company expects its revenue to grow again, targeting $ 4.6 billion next year and about $ 7 billion by 2024.