Houghton Mifflin Harcourt‘s IPO had a modest start on Tuesday night, when the company priced their stock at $12 a share — below the planned target range of $14 to $16 a share, reflecting a softer reception from investors. But those shares popped when trading began at roughly 10:50 Wednesday morning on the NASDAQ, rising 30 percent or more before settling back to roughly $15 a share when we were finalizing the morning’s mail. The reduction in proceeds from the initial sale has no impact on the company, since all the money raised goes to the existing shareholders, who were selling […]
Finance
Chegg’s Hot/Cold IPO
Chegg.com’s initial public offering of stock came to market with stronger than expected demand, pricing 15 million shares at $12.50 a share — above the expected offering range of $9.50 to $11.50 a share. But that initial demand looks to have been driven by speculators hoping for a quick flip on the first dotcom offering to follow Twitter’s big IPO from November 7 rather than investors eager for a piece of the textbook rental business. Chegg’s shares have declined since opening earlier this morning, currently down over 15 percent at 11:00 and trading back at the middle of the expected […]
Widespread Layoffs At Follett’s College Bookstores
On Friday, college bookstore operator Follett Higher Education Group announced widespread layoffs across their stores, eliminating 570 full-time positions. The memo from svp retail operations Bob Scholl was posted on a web site featuring comments from anonymous employees. The company is converting those full-time jobs into more flexible part-time positions, which the company strains to position as providing a better experience in stores for customers. According to the post, Scholl wrote: “Managers across many of our stores took a series of difficult actions tied to an important Follett initiative…. In order to deliver the hassle-free shopping experience that our customers expect, […]
Intel Buys Kno; Kindle Said to Eye Sweden; Ransom’s Free Resources
Big companies, and big investment, continue to flow towards “ed-tech,” as Intel announced on Friday that it acquired education software company Kno. Intel had previously made a$20 million investment in the company, as part of a $37.5 million round of financing in 2011. Kno started as a hardware company, aiming to make tablets for educational markets, and then shifted to a strategy of helping to digitize, enhance and sell electronic textbooks. Intel says in the announcement: “The acquisition of Kno boosts Intel’s global digital content library to more than 225,000 higher education and K-12 titles through existing partnerships with 75 […]
Zola Announces More Funders; Harper Enhances with An App
Start-up Zola Books has raised another $3.9 million in financing, “to grow [their] engineering and strategic partnership initiatives.” (The $5.1 million figure you might have seen includes previous funding.) New named investors include Cablevision founder Charles Dolan, Bob Kohn, Jeff Pulver, David Placek, director Paul Saltzman (Prom Night in Mississippi); Peter Sundman, and early-stage investor fund Radcliff Group. More authors connected to Zola founder Joe Regal’s literary agency have also participated, with Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram) and Martin Clark joining previous participants including Audrey Niffenegger and Josh Bazell. Zola has acquired exclusive ebook rights for five backlist works by Joan […]
Houghton IPO to Start Trading November 14; Chegg Offering Coming, Too
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt formally announced their planned IPO on Friday, offering 18.25 million shares (with another 2.7 million shares on option to the underwriters for overallotments) at an expected price of $14 to $16 a share. The stock, listing on the NASDAQ under the symbol HMHC, is expected to start trading on November 14. The official investor roadshow begins next Monday. The underwriters are putting the approximate deal size at $275 million, at the midpoint of the expected pricing. As indicated previously, the company itself will receive no proceeds from the offering, which is designed to let their long-suffering investors […]