Yandex IPO strong in opening; shares down on day 2
The Russian search company started with a price of $25 per share yesterday and saw its stock climb to $37.75. But in its second day of trading, Yandex is trading lower on the Nasdaq.
After a strong debut on the Nasdaq yesterday, Russia's most popular search engine, Yandex, is seeing its shares slide in its second day of trading.
Yesterday, Yandex, which attracted 38.3 million unique users in March and secured 64 percent of all Russian search traffic, priced its initial public offering at $25 per share. Almost immediately, the company's shares soared, and continued to rise throughout the day. At the close of trading yesterday, Yandex shares settled at $37.75 after reaching a high of more than $42.
The company's success in its first day of trading helped further support the idea that Web companies might perform well on the stock market. Last week, business-networking site LinkedIn opened at $45 per share on the New York Stock Exchange. Within hours, its shares reached a high of $122.70 before finally ending the day up 109 percent to $94.25 per share.
Since then, LinkedIn has been performing well for investors. As of this writing, the company's shares are down 45 cents to $95, slightly higher than its first-day close.
Shares of Yandex are at $35.17 in midday trading today, down $3.67.
Even so, Yandex's financial performance has been strong as of late. During the first quarter, the company generated nearly 3.9 billion Russian rubles ($137 million) and a profit of 820 million rubles. In 2010, it scored a profit of more than 3.8 billion rubles, easily besting the 2 billion rubles it made in 2009.
Yandex is the latest in a potentially growing number of companies that could go public. Just yesterday, AllThingsD cited sources who said that social-gaming company Zynga could file for an IPO as early as this week. And as always, speculation abounds that Facebook will go public sooner rather than later.