New Stock On The Rise: Snap Share Price Opens At More Than $24 And Climbs To $25, Above Expected $17

After Snap Inc. (SNAP) co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange Thursday morning, traders began buying shares of the newly public company, the parent of image and video messaging app Snapchat, just after 11 a.m., sending it to highs of around $25.50.

The Los Angeles-based company launched its initial public offering Wednesday night, introducing 200 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange, then priced at $17 each—above expectations of between $14 and $16 per share—raising $3.4 billion with a company valuation of $24 billion, beating previous estimates of a maximum value of around $22 billion.

Facebook Inc., by comparison, was valued at $104 billion at the time of its IPO, while Twitter Inc.’s value at IPO stood at just over $14 billion.

Snap’s NYSE debut was not without controversy, however. The Securities and Exchange Commission planned to evaluate whether the company’s decision to deny its basic shareholders voting rights, as outlined in a Feb. 16 SEC filing, would lead to issues involving corporate governance, an SEC official told Reuters Wednesday.

Voting rights, according to the filing, would be concentrated among Class C shares, reserved for Spiegel and co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Robert Murphy, and Class B shares, which would be reserved for, as the newswire put it, “Snap insiders.” Class A shares—the ones on offer at the NYSE—would hold no voting rights, potentially limiting requirements that its executives disclose their pay and information related to company operations.

“The question becomes, ‘Since there are no common shareholders’ proxy votes to do, what does that do to the level of disclosures it will have to do for annual meetings and annual reports?’” said Kurt Schacht, who chairs the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee, according to Reuters.

Another concern dampening the hype surrounding Snap’s IPO was the expectation that steep advertising competition would prove a formidable obstacle to the company’s revenue growth. The share prices of its two main competitors, Facebook (FB) and Twitter (TWTR), zigzagged in the days leading up to Snap’s market debut.