IPO
After months of anticipation, Box listed on the NYSE Friday morning. The cloud storage company initially sold 12.5 million shares at $14, above its $11-$13 target, to raise $175 million, while the banks underwriting the process, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and JP Morgan, have the option to purchase 1.9 million more shares which would push the amount raised even higher. Having purchased shares at 29 cents back in 2009, original investor Draper Fisher Jurveston saw the total value of its holdings balloon to $322.5 million, a 42x return. Investors in the company’s later rounds, like TPG and Coatue Management, that purchased shares at $20, were not as lucky, but a pop of around 65 percent in the stock during Friday morning trading should help.
M&A
Google has led a $1 billion financing round in SpaceX, Elon Musk’s commercial space exploration company. Together with Fidelity, the round’s other investor, the two have claim to a ten percent equity stake in the company, now valued at $10 billion. Google was interested in SpaceX for strategic reasons: the cash infusion will be used in part to support a satellite program designed to broaden global Internet access.
Google is also in discussions to acquire Softcard, a payments joint venture between AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. The deal would be for less than $100 million, but would provide Google with a payments platform supported by the major wireless carriers to challenge the newly launched Apple Pay.
Li Ka-Shing’s Hong Kong-based holding company Hutchison Whampoa is expected to buy the British mobile phone business O2 from Spain’s Telefonica for around £10.25 billion. The deal has reportedly been in the works since Christmas.
Twitter announced this week its acquisition of Zipdial, a Bangalore-based provider of “missed call” marketing. Because of the country’s high percentage of prepaid phone plans, a surveyed 65 percent of Indian phone users prefer to call and immediately hang up instead of having a short phone call. Zipdial uses this practice to encourage people to call in and collect coupons. Bloomberg reported that the deal was for $30 million.
In anticipation of its expected re-launch of iTunes, Apple has acquired Semetric, a British digital music analytics provider. The company claims to be able to track illegal music downloads, as well as social media mentions and legal music sales. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
CloudOn, a mobile productivity platform for the Microsoft Office suite, has been acquired by Dropbox for an undisclosed amount. The Herzliya, Israel-based company will shut down operations and its apps, currently being used by 9 million people, on March 15th.
Microsoft announced Tuesday that it had acquired Equivio, a text analytics service specifically geared towards legal documents for a rumored $200 million. The technology will be rolled into the Office 365 suite.
The online travel booking site Orbitz is exploring a sale to private and strategic investors, according to Bloomberg. The Chicago-based public company has a current market capitalization of around $1.1 billion.