Finance

Uber has officially priced its IPO at $45 per share

Dara Khosrowshahi
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Carlo Allegri/Reuters
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Uber priced its initial public offering at $45 per share, the company announced Thursday evening.

This price is at the low point of the $44 to $50 range previously set by the company in earlier financial documents.

The price would give Uber an initial market cap of $75.5 billion, significantly below the $120 billion price valuation that some of the company's bankers reportedly sought at the beginning of the IPO process.

Overall, Uber will raise $8.1 billion, plus $500 million in a private placement from PayPal.

Uber is expected to start trading on Friday on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker "UBER." 

The IPO was led by Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs along with 27 other banks.

The ride-hailing company, set to have the largest IPO of 2019, tempered back its price expectations as its smaller competitor Lyft struggled to maintain its own standing in the public markets. Lyft went public at the end of March with a $21 billion valuation, and it has since sunk to a market cap of about $15 billion.

Read more: A Nasdaq executive says companies are rushing to get their IPOs out before Trump goes up for re-election

Like Lyft, Uber faces substantial quarterly losses, even 10 years into doing business. Uber reported $11.27 billion in revenue in calendar year 2018 and lost $3 billion on operations during that same period.

The Wedbush analyst Dan Ives applauded the pricing strategy in a note on Thursday.

"We view Uber's conservative pricing as a smart and prudent strategy coming out of the box as it clearly learned from its 'little brother' Lyft, and the experience it has gone through over the past month," Ives wrote.

The ride-hailing sector's pricing struggles come amid widespread success from the other tech IPOs that have hit the public markets in the first half of the year.

PagerDuty went public in mid-April with a $1.79 billion valuation and has since shot up above $3 billion in value.

Pinterest and Zoom, which went public one week later, have also seen widespread support from investors. Pinterest went public with a $10 billion valuation, and it's since shot up to about $16 billion. Meanwhile, the video-conferencing platform Zoom went public with a $9.2 billion valuation and is now valued at about $20 billion.

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Becky Peterson was formerly a tech features correspondent focused on long-form profiles and investigations into the most interesting people and companies at the intersection of technology and finance.She's broken news on major tech stories including Palantir's work on Project Maven, Peter Thiel's $18 million estate in Miami (which was once featured on MTV's 'The Real World'), Jeffrey Epstein's tour of SpaceX, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi's insistence that employees take "the D."Previously, she covered enterprise tech and tech investment banking with a focus on M&A, IPO and venture capital deals in San Francisco. She graduated from New York University with a master's degree in media, culture and communication with an emphasis on technology and society. ExpertiseSilicon Valley, Venture Capital, Investment Banking, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine MaxwellPopular articlesInside the turmoil at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where employees say divorce, Epstein, and vaccines have left some staffers polishing their résumésThe secret life of Ian Osborne, the shadowy 38-year-old cofounder of Chamath Palihapitiya's SPAC who has built the ultimate black book of billionairesSilicon Valley VCs are at war with the 'far left radicals' running CaliforniaInside the life of Ghislaine Maxwell's secret husband, a once-high-flying tech entrepreneur backed by Eric Schmidt who is now a central figure in one of the country's most high-profile legal casesRent the Runway CEO Jennifer Hyman, one of the most successful female founders, is fighting to save her companyJeffrey Epstein set Elon Musk's brother up with a girlfriend in effort to get close to the Tesla founder, sources sayA drunken late-night assault allegation has roiled the secretive world of Mark Zuckerberg's private family office. Personal aides are speaking out about claims that household staff endured sexual harassment and racism from their colleagues.