Recent tech IPO performance

Pandora (P) looks good today

** daily **

**weekly**

Pandora Media (P) - two weeks later +40%

Pandora gained 40% over the past 2 weeks:

Recommended buy on Monday, Sept 19: Pandora Media (P) looks like a buy

Pandora Media (P) looks like a buy

Pandora Media, Inc. (Pandora), incorporated in January 2000, is an Internet radio in the United States. As of January 31, 2011, it had over 80 million registered users. The Music Genome Project and its playlist generating algorithms enable it to deliver personalized radio to its listeners. When a listener enters a single song, artist or genre to start a station, a process it calls seeding, the Music Genome Project together with its playlist generating algorithms, allows it to instantly generate a station. It generates revenue from advertising. It also offers a subscription service to listeners. The Pandora service allows listeners to seed personalized stations with artists, composers, songs and genres or choose stations organized by genre. Listeners can create up to 100 personalized stations and use its QuickMix combination feature to listen to two or more of their stations at one time.

The Company competes with CBS, Clear Channel, Sirius XM, iheartradio, Last.fm, Slacker Personal Radio, RDIO, Rhapsody, Spotify, Hulu, VEVO, You Tube, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google.

Pandora Media Inc
2101 Webster Street
Oakland CA 94612

SEC on lookout for bubble-era IPO practices

(Reuters) - Some recent red-hot initial public offerings have the Securities and Exchange Commission concerned that Wall Street's underwriters may be tempted to revive some troubling tech bubble practices.

"You can't help but be concerned by IPO valuations," Robert Khuzami, the SEC's enforcement chief, told an audience of Wall Street lawyers and compliance officers in New York on Tuesday.

A combination of first-day trading spikes -- such as a 109 percent advance by social networking company LinkedIn Corp (LNKD) last month -- and razor-thin yields on bonds and other securities, may create an environment where Wall Street investment banks can take advantage of investor demand.

"It hasn't been that long ago that allocation practices were at the forefront of everyone's mind, and charges were brought against firms for Reg M and aftermarket violations for using their allocation process for creating demand in the aftermarket," Khuzami said at a luncheon hosted by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

Khuzami said the SEC will look to see "whether or not" these issues "give rise to practices that we saw historically and that troubled us."

LinkedIn's shares on May 19 more than doubled in price on their first day of trade on the New York Stock Exchange, evoking memories of the frenzied dot-com bubble years. The advent of online brokerage accounts and a nation of day traders helped then start-ups like theglobe.com, VA Linux and MarketWatch.com rise by six- and seven-fold.

Many of these bubble babies burned through their proceeds and then disappeared, leaving millions of small investors stuck with losses.

The SEC and other regulators later brought cases against Wall Street's biggest banks for a number of practices designed to generate those eye-popping returns.

Regulation M is a set of SEC rules intended to preclude manipulative conduct by individuals with an interest in the outcome of a securities offering.

Investment bankers, serving as the bridge between investors and companies, typically try to price an IPO so that the stock rises about 15 percent on the first day of trading: enough to reward investors who made a bet but not so much that issuers feel short-changed.

NEW BUBBLE?

Recently, several hot-button technology companies and Chinese firms have generated big first-day gains.

Renren Inc (RENN), one of the biggest social networking companies in China, last month surged 296 percent in its debut. Strong demand for the unprofitable company was viewed as a sign investors were eager to snap up social media companies.

There was also a 134 percent jump by Qihoo 360 Technology (QIHU) in March. Yandex NV (YNDX), known as "Russia's Google," rose 55 percent in its trading debut.

Khuzami before his luncheon remarks told Reuters that the recent news of accounting scandals involving a number of Chinese companies has the agency's full attention.

"We're looking at that issue from a variety of fronts, from listing standards of the exchanges, to the (Public Company Accounting Oversight Board) and enforcement," he said on the sidelines of the SIFMA event. "We're obviously focused on the auditing firms. It's a problem and we're devoting some energy to it."

The recent collapse of Sino-Forest, a Canada-listed Chinese company, raised pressure on regulators to stem a tide of accounting scandals that snagged investors who had been eager to tap into China's growth.

Last week SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro said the agency would address concern about shoddy accounting that has caused numerous Chinese companies to restate earnings and send their share prices plummeting.

Some market watchers, though, say there are signs that investors are more skeptical this time around.

Internet radio provider Pandora Media Inc (P) rose by half on its first day, but the money-losing company saw its shares fell hard in subsequent days and remain below their offering price.

Pandora : drops 23.88% on 2nd day of trading

Pandora shares fall 23.88% after IPO rally. The Oakland, Calif.-based Internet radio service, the latest technology start-up to go public, is expected to continue to lose money over the next couple of years as it works to build up its business and revenue base, analysts say.

Pandora Media Inc., the Internet radio company, is valued almost as highly as traditional U.S. station owners combined even after its shares plummeted on their second day of trading.

The chart below compares Pandora’s capitalization as of yesterday with the total value of 10 radio-station operators.  The group includes CC Media Holdings Inc., the owner of Clear Channel Communications Inc., as well as Citadel Broadcasting Corp. and Cumulus Media Inc., Citadel’s would-be buyer.

Pandora, based in Oakland, California, had a market cap of $2.12 billion after tumbling 24 percent to $13.26 yesterday. The industry valuation was $2.23 billion.

“The issue with Pandora is: How far will it fall?” Francis Gaskins, president of IPODesktop.com, told Bloomberg Television yesterday in an interview. “I just don’t see a floor right now in that stock.” Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG LLC, set a $5.50 estimate for the next 12 months when he started
coverage with a “sell” rating yesterday.
    

Beasley Broadcasting Group Inc., Emmis Communications Corp., Entercom Communications Corp., Radio One Inc., Saga Communications Inc., Salem Communications Corp. and Spanish Broadcasting System Inc. were included with CC Media, Citadel and Cumulus in calculating the industry’s value.
   

CBS Corp., whose radio unit generates less than 10 percent of the company’s revenue, and Sirius XM Radio Inc., a satellite broadcaster, were excluded. Their market values as of yesterday were $17 billion and $7.66 billion, respectively.

Pandora IPO prices at $16 per share; seeks $176.2 million in expanded share sale after 10-year loss

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Internet radio site Pandora priced its initial public offering at $16 a share late Tuesday -- almost twice what it initially expected to fetch.

Pandora, which has never turned a profit, filed to go public in February. At the time, the company expected to raise $100 million. On June 2, Pandora set a target price range of $7 to $9 per share -- then upped it to $10 to $12 per share last week.

At $16 per share, Pandora's offering gives the company a market capitalization of $2.6 billion.

Pandora will begin trading Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "P." Founded in 2000 as the Music Genome Project, the site uses algorithms and user feedback to generate music recommendations for its listeners.

In its updated filing Tuesday, Pandora said it lost $6.8 million on revenue of $51 million in its first fiscal quarter, which ended April 30.
Pandora has never turned a profit, and the company said it expects to continue losing money "through at least fiscal 2012."
Its audience numbers are strong, however. As of April, Pandora had 90 million registered members, up from 80 million in February. Those members racked up 3.8 billion hours of listening to Pandora's song stream at the end of the 2011 fiscal year.

But as as its audience grows, so does its biggest cost: the royalties it pays for the music it streams. Pandora's filing said its current rates for royalty payments are good until 2015, after which it will need to renegotiate.

The company does make some money off one of two options it offers listeners: A free, ad-supported stream or a "premium" plan priced at $36 per year, which offers higher audio quality and no ads.