Groupon Files IPO. Going Rate: $750 Million

By Chuck Sudo in News on Jun 2, 2011 9:00PM

Groupon filed a prospectus for its long-awaited initial public offering today, and it's valued at up to $750 million. That's a lot of deals, folks.

The prospectus also gave analysts and the curious a look at Groupon's finances for the first time. What we know now? Groupon has high operating expenses. the company brought in $644.7 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2011 but posted a net loss of $147 million. IN the filing, Groupon said, "We anticipate that our operating expenses will increase substantially in the foreseeable future as we continue to invest to increase our subscriber base, increase the number and variety of deals we offer each day, expand our marketing channels, expand our operations, hire additional employees and develop our technology platform."

So they're going to hire more people to write pithy pitches for deals that customers are going to either buy or not based on the value? Okay.

We wished Groupon would have written their IPO prospectus in the form of one of their sales pitches. Here's one Benjy came up with when we were discussing the IPO.

"When we were kids, who didn't love bubbles? But why spend $1.99 on a pink plastic bottle when you can spend millions on the latest internet darling? It'll fly sky high and shimmer if the light before popping spectacularly, just like you remember from the days when your apparel was more likely from Oshkosh than American Apparel."

Here's one from Prescott.

"The one-legged ipo bird was once thought extinct, until famed German naturalist Engelbert Grimm discovered one during a recent trip to the Galapagos Islands, when he tripped over a giant tortoise and crushed the ipo to death. Fortunately, you can perform CPR on the hapless ipo with today's Groupon: for $100 per share, you get a subscription to Groupon's increasingly off-beat and witty annual reports (a $750 million value)."