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.
Macronix International Co (旺宏), the world’s biggest NOR flash memory supplier, yesterday said it would spend NT$22 billion (US$699.1 million) on capacity expansion this year to increase its production of mid-to-low-density memory chips as the world’s major memorychip suppliers are phasing out the market. The company said its planned capital expenditures are about 11 times higher than the NT$1.8 billion it spent on new facilities and equipment last year. A majority of this year’s outlay would be allocated to step up capacity of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips, which are used in embedded multimedia cards (eMMC), a managed
CULPRITS: Factors that affected the slip included falling global crude oil prices, wait-and-see consumer attitudes due to US tariffs and a different Lunar New Year holiday schedule Taiwan’s retail sales ended a nine-year growth streak last year, slipping 0.2 percent from a year earlier as uncertainty over US tariff policies affected demand for durable goods, data released on Friday by the Ministry of Economic Affairs showed. Last year’s retail sales totaled NT$4.84 trillion (US$153.27 billion), down about NT$9.5 billion, or 0.2 percent, from 2024. Despite the decline, the figure was still the second-highest annual sales total on record. Ministry statistics department deputy head Chen Yu-fang (陳玉芳) said sales of cars, motorcycles and related products, which accounted for 17.4 percent of total retail rales last year, fell NT$68.1 billion, or
In the wake of strong global demand for AI applications, Taiwan’s export-oriented economy accelerated with the composite index of economic indicators flashing the first “red” light in December for one year, indicating the economy is in booming mode, the National Development Council (NDC) said yesterday. Moreover, the index of leading indicators, which gauges the potential state of the economy over the next six months, also moved higher in December amid growing optimism over the outlook, the NDC said. In December, the index of economic indicators rose one point from a month earlier to 38, at the lower end of the “red” light.
MediaTek Inc (聯發科) shares yesterday notched their best two-day rally on record, as investors flock to the Taiwanese chip designer on excitement over its tie-up with Google. The Taipei-listed stock jumped 8.59 percent, capping a two-session surge of 19 percent and closing at a fresh all-time high of NT$1,770. That extended a two-month rally on growing awareness of MediaTek’s work on Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs), which are chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications. It also highlights how fund managers faced with single-stock limits on their holding of market titan Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) are diversifying into other AI-related firms.
RSS