Tableau Software has again increased the price range of shares in its impending initial public offering, putting the top range at $30 in a sign of strong interest among investors in the Seattle data visualization software maker.
Tableau is expected to begin trading later this week on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “DATA.” If it can fetch that price, the company would debut with a market value of almost $1.73 billion.
When its IPO registration statement was made public in early April, Tableau aimed to raise up to $150 million (though the company would net less than that because of underwriting discounts, commissions, and offering expenses). Early last week, the 10-year-old company bumped the price range up to $23 to $26 a share. Today, Tableau again amended its registration statement, setting a range of $28 to $30 a share, which, at the midpoint, would bring a net $132.3 million to the company’s coffers.
For investors wondering how Tableau shares may perform, there’s a Tableau data visualization—or “viz”—for that, albeit a slightly dated one. Back in 2009, the company made a graph analyzing the stock performance of the top 100 public tech companies by market capitalization following their IPOs. It broke the companies into two groups: those that were profitable at the time of the IPO, and those that were not.
“Perhaps unexpectedly, in the first two years after the IPO, the average returns of the unprofitable group easily outperformed the profitable companies,” reads the text accompanying the viz. “…But everything changes by the third year. While the average returns of the profitable group continue to climb to 153%, the unprofitable group’s returns fall off a cliff to 36%. That’s a significant difference.”
Where does Tableau stand as it goes public? Hard to know exactly, as it’s going out during the second quarter, so we won’t know whether it is profitable now until it reports earnings sometime after June 30.
The company had first quarter revenue of $40 million, up 62 percent from the year earlier, but posted a $3.7 million loss. Operating expenses more than doubled in the quarter as Tableau is rapidly growing its staff.
