Cloud data warehouse start-up Snowflake Inc’s shares doubled on Wednesday, raising more than US$3 billion in a blockbuster initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange.
Snowflake shares priced at US$120 at the opening bell finished the official trading day just shy of US$254.
The San Mateo, California-based company has grown quickly since it was founded eight years ago in Silicon Valley and was valued at about US$12.4 billion in a private funding round early this year, despite not being profitable.
Snowflake was valued at more than US$70 billion based on its share price on Wednesday.
“It’s surprising, but it’s a validation of our initial vision,” Benoit Dageville, one of the French cofounders of Snowflake, said in an interview.
“Snowflake IPOing as the world’s largest software IPO is showing that markets for enterprise software continue to be far larger than most anticipate,” Box cloud computing company chief executive Aaron Levie wrote on Twitter. “With exponential growth in data, devices, and apps, something already big today might be 100X bigger in just a few years.”
Snowflake revenue jumped to US$264.7 million last year from US$97 million the year before, while its net loss grew to US$348.5 million from US$178 million in that same comparison, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
“Beginning with our first customers in 2014, the response was beyond our expectations as we addressed major shortcomings of existing solutions and expanded from a data warehouse into an integrated cloud data platform,” the start-up said in a regulatory filing.
Snowflake provides online data storage, analytics and management, essentially providing infrastructure as a service to businesses seeking to operate online.
It relies on data centers hosted by Amazon.com Inc, Google and Microsoft Corp, according to the filing.
While the COVID-19 pandemic is taking a toll on the economy, it is also accelerating a trend toward businesses connecting with customers online and relying on the cloud or remote work.
Snowflake reported having more than 3,100 customers at the end of July, including Adobe Systems Inc, Capital One Financial Corp and Sony Corp.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
RATIONING: The proposal would give the Trump administration ample leverage to negotiate investments in the US as it decides how many chips to give each country US officials are debating a new regulatory framework for exporting artificial intelligence (AI) chips and are considering requiring foreign nations to invest in US AI data centers or security guarantees as a condition for granting exports of 200,000 chips or more, according to a document seen by Reuters. The rules are not yet final and could change. They would be the first attempt to regulate the flow of AI chips to US allies and partners since US President Donald Trump’s administration said it rescinded its predecessor’s so-called AI diffusion rules. Those rules sought to keep a significant amount of AI
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
RSS