Thursday February 11, 2021
Tinder rival is buying himself free
Bumble makes a stunning stock market debut
Women take the first step on the dating app Bumble. CEO Herd has now dared to go public with her company and one can say: The first date was a direct hit. With the eight billion raised, the group also finances its independence.
The shares of Tinder rival Bumble got off to a brilliant start on the US technology exchange Nasdaq. The papers of the operator of the online dating platforms Bumble and Badoo, listed under the ticker abbreviation BMBL, met with strong investor interest at the start of trading – the purchase price was 76 US dollars, almost 77 percent above the issue price. Overall, the company was valued at around $ 8.2 billion when it went public.
The company intends to use most of the proceeds to reduce debt and also to buy back shares from shareholders before the IPO. This particularly affects the investment giant Blackstone Group, which acquired a majority in Bumble in 2019. If the share offering is fully exercised, Blackstone's stake should drop to 47 percent, according to the prospectus.
The Bumble app was started in 2014 by the only 31-year-old Whitney Wolfe Herd, who was already one of the co-founders of the big competitor Tinder and is now the youngest CEO to date to have a major US company listed on the stock exchange. A special feature of Bumble is that women take the first step in dating there. In the nine months ending September 2020, the company made a net loss of $ 28 million.
Despite the red numbers, demand for the shares was so high before the IPO that Bumble eventually offered 50 million shares instead of the originally planned issue of 35 million shares. In addition, the issue price was raised from initially 30 to 43 dollars per share. Bumble wanted to take around two billion dollars with the IPO and thus finance further growth and steal market share from the counterparty Tinder. That too is on the upswing. The share of the Tinder operator Match Group rose by 50 percent in the past six months.
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