Barely 30, Andrew Mason, a young Chicagoan with a business bump, is on his way to joining the pantheon of Internet billionaires. The IPO of Groupon, the company he founded three years ago and which today has an audience of 143 million contacts worldwide, knocks on the door: today the price of the shares will be fixed, to be identified in the range between 16 and 18 dollars. Tomorrow, finally, the debut with the placement of 30 million shares. However, a record will be broken: no one has ever managed to get a start-up born in the classic basement of a city listed in just three years with a billionaire placement.
Groupon has thus decided to challenge the volatility of the markets even if the price, according to forecasts, will be much more modest than the one obtained from Linkedin at the beginning of 2011. The valuation for Groupon, the facts, should settle around 10-11 billion much less than the 20 billion dollars forecast a few months ago. Several factors play against the freshman: 1) the difficult moment of the markets; 2) the investigation by the SEC which, on the occasion of the prospectus, had to say on Groupon's billing criteria, especially on the amount of commissions retroceded to customers; 3) even more the drop in growth, which went from the astonishing +72% in the first quarter to +10% while the earnings per single coupon fell to 37 cents (-5%).
In short, the phenomenon seems to have already entered the maturity stage and the haste with which the hypo is proceeding would be a confirmation of this. But Groupon, optimists argue, remains the fastest growing company in the Internet age: after three years of activity, Google's profits were only a quarter of those of Mason's start-up which exploited the principle of buying groups on a large scale. The group's promise is that profit margins will recover soon, thanks to the strengthening of the business areas dedicated to travel and consumer goods.
