Entrepreneur

Pinterest releases S-1 for IPO


Pinterest released its IPO prospectus on Friday, joining a bevy of tech companies going public in 2019. The stock will trade under the ticker “PINS” on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company generated $755.9 million in revenue 2018 for a net loss of $63 million. In Q4 2018 the company had 265 million monthly active users.

Global average revenue per user for 2018 was $3.14, representing a 25 percent increase compared to the previous year. In the U.S., 2018 ARPU was $9.04, marking a 47 percent increase compared to 2017. International ARPU was $0.25 in 2018, marking a 22 percent increase from the prior year.

Pinterest said that while no customer accounted for more than 10 percent of its revenue in 2018, a significant portion is concentrated in the consumer packaged goods and retail verticals.

Pinterest said in its filing that it has seen “significant growth” in international monthly active users over the past few years. The company believes this is a result of its “recent focus on localizing content in international markets” and expects growth in this segment to continue to outpace that in the U.S. in the near term.

The company will offer two classes of stock. Class A shares will receive one vote per share, while Class B shares will receive 20 votes per share. Pinterest’s filing did not list the breakdown of stock ownership among its executive officers and directors.

The San Francisco company allows users to “pin” images as they shop, plan their weddings or brainstorm vacations. Pinterest claimed more than 250 million monthly users in September. The tech company’s primary revenue stream is from advertisements, with brands paying for “promoted pins.”

In its S-1 filing, Pinterest said one risk factor is that it could fail to penetrate new demographics. Currently, 80 percent of Pinterest’s total audience in the U.S. is made up of women ages 18-64 with children, the company said, citing an independent study by Comscore.

Pinterest said its user growth had been negatively impacted in the second quarter of 2018 due to Facebook’s decision to change its login authentication systems. Pinterest noted that its reliance on other services including Facebook and Google could be a risk factor for the business.

“[I]f Facebook or Google discontinue single sign-on or experience an outage, then we may lose and be unable to recover users previously using this function, and our user growth or engagement could decline,” according to the filing.

Pinterest’s prospectus comes after similar filings from Lyft, the ride-sharing company, Zoom, a video conferencing company, and PagerDuty, a tech company whose service helps companies respond quickly when their websites experience outages. Other tech companies including Uber, Slack and Palantir are also expected to go public this year.

This story is developing. Please check back for updates.

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