Uber Starts Public Life Worth $42 Per Share, Down From Its $45 IPO Price

Morning Markets: Uber is now a public company, and it’s doing: not great.

Good morning and welcome to Uber’s first day as a public company. The ride-hailing behemoth priced its shares yesterday at $45 per share, towards the low-end of its $44-to-$50 per-share range. Some speculated whether Uber would raise that range. However, for any number of reasons (pick your favorite), the company did not raise its range.

However, raising over $8 billion in an IPO is nothing to sniff at.

And this morning Uber opened at $42 per share, down from its somewhat-lackluster IPO price. Stocks were broadly lower as Uber began to trade, putting the famous decacorn into the sea on a day when there was significant chop in the harbor. But for Uber, just getting public has been a long-running piece of work.

So now the company, flush with more cash than it perhaps has ever had, has the time to re-ignite growth, clean up its margins, and perhaps drive itself towards cashflow-breakeven. The company indicated during its IPO roadshow that it expects a future, 25 percent adjusted EBITDA margin. The firm’s first quarter adjusted EBITDA margins ran -31.3 percent to -27.0 percent, on the lower and upper bounds of the firm’s self-expected results.

Partial-comps Lyft and GrubHub were off over 5 percent and 2.5 percent in regular trading around when Uber began to trade.

We’ll have one final chart for this post in a little bit. For now, enjoy looking up the Uber ticker symbol. It’s nice to know what the firm is worth at any given moment.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.