Groupon CEO: All Is Well! Nothing to See Here! Carry On!

via allthingsd.com

Andrew Mason says Groupon is “better positioned than any other company in the world to plug local commerce into the Web,” but you wouldn’t know it from the daily deals site’s latest earnings: A fourth-quarter GAAP loss of 12 cents per share — 10 cents more than Wall Street was looking for.

As Groupon’s shares tanked in after-hours trading, Mason fielded questions from analysts on the company’s earnings call, but didn’t do much to explain how the company is going to scale its core online-coupon business. Instead, he did all that he could to paint a happy face on today’s sad results, tossing out sound bites that glossed over the issues troubling the company...

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Groupon Is Hiring An Army Of Engineers In Silicon Valley

via businessinsider.com

Groupon, which already has about 200 engineers working out of its Palo Alto office, is looking to hire as many as 100 more, boosting the Chicago-based company's headcount out West, the company tells us.

Groupon is going to host a big recruiting event for the office later this spring. The company is already buying billboards along the highways running from San Francisco to the South Bay.

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17 Extravagant Ways Big Brands Promoted Themselves At SXSW

via businessinsider.com

South by Southwest isn't only a great platform for startups. Brands that want to interact with tech influencers made themselves present in big ways around Austin.

From pop-up skate parks to hosting a live Jay-Z concert, here's how brands went big at SXSW.

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Groupon Ends The Year With $1.6 Billion In Revenues, Up 419 Percent

via techcrunch.com

Groupon just announced its first earnings report after going public last October (it missed, read our liveblog of the earnings call here.). For the full year, Groupon’s revenues were $1.6 billion, up 419 percent. The daily deal company, however, lost $350 million, most of that attributable to its very aggressive international expansion (7,000 out of its 10,000 employees are overseas). In North America, it turned an operating profit of $22 million, which was counteracted by $137 million in international operating losses.

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Holy Crap! Groupon Tanked Another 9% Today

via businessinsider.com

Groupon is now around $15/share, losing 9% on a day when broader markets are up around 2-2.5%.

It's now well below its IPO price, and about 50% below its high of around $30.

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Study: 56% of People Still Dig Daily Deals

Even though earlier this week Groupon's stock dropped 35% below its original IPO price, a new survey from LinkShare says that more than half of people would still go for daily deals. The online marketing solutions site surveyed 1,000 people and found that 56% of people would still buy from a brand they didn't recognize if the deal arrived at the right time. Forty-one percent of people said they had purchased something through a voucher or offer that they had never thought to buy previously.

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Groupon shares drop below $20 IPO price for first time

via digitaltrends.com

In what has been a difficult week for Groupon on the stock market, shares in the company fell below its $20 IPO price for the first time since going public earlier this month.

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Groupon Shares are Collapsing!

via businessinsider.com

Update: The stock is down 15% now, trading as low as $20.03.

Original: In a just barely down market, Groupon's shares are tanking.

The stock is off 12% as of this writing, and we're not really sure what's causing the move. It's trading at $20.70, which is almost exactly what it was priced at for its IPO.

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Groupon's Stock Is Tanking, Approaching The IPO Price Level

via businessinsider.com

Groupon's stock is tanking this morning, falling 7% to $23.

The markets overall are crumbling thanks to a bunch of bad news coming out of Europe

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Groupon shares soar in early trading

via news.cnet.com

Daily-deals provider Groupon has gone public at last, and its shares soared from the start.

In the opening minutes, Groupon was trading up to $29.20, a 46 percent gain on its opening price of $20 per share.

Groupon closed out its first day on the market up 30 percent to $26.11.

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Groupon Vs. Zynga: Which Company Will Be More Valuable Post-IPO?

‘Tis the season of the IPO. So far, 2011 has seen companies like LinkedIn, Pandora, Yandex, Zillow, and RenRen come to market. As you’ve heard, Groupon and Zynga are next up in the IPO pipeline, with both companies arriving on public markets within weeks of each other. Groupon, barring some catastrophic event, will begin trading publicly on NASDAQ November 4th, with shares set at $20 a pop at a valuation of $12.7 billion.

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Watch The Groupon CFO Defend The Company On CNBC

via businessinsider.com

Groupon CFO Jason Child was on CNBC facing one his harsher critics in Jim Cramer.

Some of the key points he made:

He says revenue per customer has been increasing ever since Groupon launched.

Groupon is spending $700 million per year, and nearly break even. Child doesn't think it will need to spend more on marketing because at $700 million annually, it's plenty to grow going forward.

Cramer thought Groupon wasn't selling enough stock. Child said that floating $805 million, is sizable.

Groupon's big base of customers and merchants is its killer advantage.

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And Now Another Analyst Says Groupon Is Worth Less Than The IPO Price...

via businessinsider.com

Well, that makes three of us.

Last week, I ran some numbers on Groupon and concluded that the company was probably worth $6-$9 billion, well below its contemplated IPO price.

Given the risk in the company's transition to profitability--chopping back marketing spending, revenue deceleration, intense competition, backlash against the product--this led me to conclude that the stock wouldn't really offer a compelling value unless it were valued at $5 billion or below.

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Groupon CEO Andrew Mason Tells Investors He's Firing 10% Of His Salespeople

via businessinsider.com

Groupon will fire the worst 10 percent of its sales staff and replace them with new employees, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason told investors in Boston as a part of the IPO roadshow.

Mason said he wanted Groupon to sign on more high-value merchants, which would require better sales people, according to a report by Reuters.

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Groupon sues former employees at Google

via news.cnet.com

Groupon has sued two former sales managers it says took trade secrets to Google's competing venture when they quit the daily deals site, according to a Bloomberg report.

Michael Nolan and Brian Hanna left the Chicago-based company in January last month to join Google Offers, taking customer lists and marketing strategies with them, according to a civil complaint filed today in the Chancery Division of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois. The suit, which doesn't name Google as a defendant, seeks to prevent them from sharing the information with Google, according to the report.

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Groupon $11-billion valuation hard to justify

via theglobeandmail.com

Burning piles of cash to swiftly vanquish rivals and grab what business school professors call the “first mover advantage” can work. Just look at Amazon. So, too, Groupon thinks a chunk more capital can solidify its position atop the Internet coupon heap. But this strategy generally only succeeds when it creates costly barriers to entry. Groupon is trying, but there’s not enough evidence yet to justify a valuation of more than $11-billion (U.S.).

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Groupon scales back IPO, now looking to raise $540 million

via digitaltrends.com

In a regulatory filing on Friday, daily deals company Groupon said it would be selling 30 million shares for between $16 and $18 in a bid to raise as much as $540 million in its upcoming IPO.

Daily deals site Groupon is hoping to raise somewhere in the region of $500 million in its upcoming IPO. Back in June it was talking of raising $750 million. The latest, more modest figure has been put down to a number of factors, including volatile market conditions and the departure of two chief operating officers this year.

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Groupon Is A Disaster

via businessinsider.com

Only a few months ago, Groupon was the Internet's next great thing. Business media christened it the fastest growing company ever. Copycats proliferated. And investors salivated over the prospect of Groupon going public.

Today, the startup that pioneered online daily deals for coupons is an example of how fast an Internet darling can fall.

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Groupon To Sell 30M Shares At $16-$18 A Pop, Valuation As Much As $11.4B

via techcrunch.com

And so it begins. Groupon this morning published the expected price range of its shares, to be sold in an upcoming initial public offering, in an SEC filing.

The daily deals company plans to sell 30 million shares at $16 to $18 a pop, which would see Groupon raise between $480 million and $540 million. This would give Groupon a valuation as high as $11.4 billion.

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Groupon scaling back IPO, reports say

Groupon is scaling back the size of its initial public offering as a result of market volatility and company miscues, according to published reports.

The daily deals provider is expected to offer less than 10 percent of the company at a valuation of $12.5 billion, people familiar with the deal told the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Both papers reported that the deal itself, which is expected close in the next couple of weeks, is expected to be $500 million to $700 million.

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