Sonos surges 33% in its trading debut

sonos

Sonos opened for trading at $16 on Thursday and surged by as much as 32.7%.
It had priced its initial public offering at $15, below the expected range of $17 to $19.
Sonos' IPO came as the California-based company seeks to build market share among voice-assistant-enabled smart speakers.

Sonos shares opened for trading at $16 apiece on Thursday, and closed at $19.91, gaining $32.73% in the trading debut.

The smart-speaker company had priced its initial public offering at $15 per share on Thursday, below the expected range of $17 to $19, giving the company a valuation of about $1.5 billion.

In its regulatory filing to go public, Sonos said that its speakers were registered in 7 million homes and that its customers listened to 70 hours of content a month.

The California-based company is seeking to build market share among voice-assistant-enabled smart speakers. Sonos in the past year released two such speakers, the Sonos One and the Sonos Beam, which support Amazon's Alexa.

sonos number of speakers

Sonos said it intended to use the proceeds of its IPO to invest in marketing and development.

The IPO came roughly four months after the direct listing of Spotify. The streaming service has recently filed dozens of patents for hardware devices and music-discovery software, setting it up as a potential competitor for Sonos.

Sonos lost $14.22 million — or $0.50 per share — on revenue of $992.53 million in the most recent fiscal year ending September 30, a filing showed. The firm qualifies as an "emerging growth company" because its revenue was less than $1.07 billion, meaning the Securities and Exchange Commission permitted it to make narrower disclosures about its finances.

The company had $39.7 million in debt as of March 31.

Sonos is listed on the Nasdaq with the ticker SONO. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Allen & Company were the lead underwriters of the IPO.