Big-data analytics company surges in market debut

BENGALURU: Shares of Cloudera Inc surged as much as 24 percent in their stock market debut on Friday, the latest in a string of technology initial public offerings this year, giving the big-data analytics company a market value of about $2.3 billion.

Cloudera's offering of 15 million shares was priced at $15 per share, above its expected range of $12-$14, and raised $225 million.

Shares opened at $17.80 on the New York Stock Exchange and hit a high of $18.64 in early trading.

Cloudera helps businesses store, process and analyse data through Hadoop, an open-source software system that can sort and handle massive amounts of information.

The company has more than 1,000 customers, including Dish Network Corp, Citigroup, MasterCard and Cisco Systems.

Its closest rival, Hortonworks Inc, whose offerings are also tied to Hadoop, went public in February last year.

Hortonworks' shares had climbed about 11 percent since then. Palo Alto, California-based Cloudera's valuation is a steep fall from the $4.1 billion it was once valued at in the private market.

Investors including chipmaker Intel Corp piled into Cloudera several years ago when a flood of money into private technology companies pushed valuations skyward.

This year has been a hotbed for technology IPOs after a dull 2016, which marked the slowest year for such IPOs since 2008, when just 20 technology companies went public.

The number of U.S. IPOs has more than tripled so far in 2017, compared to year-ago levels, with the technology sector leading the issuance market, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Snap Inc, the owner of the popular image-sharing app Snapchat, grabbed eyeballs when it went public last month in the biggest technology IPO in three years.

Cloudera, founded in 2008, is backed by Fidelity Investments as well as high-profile investors including T Rowe Price and Google Ventures, the venture capital investment arm of Alphabet Inc.