
Tesla Prices IPO At $17 Per Share - transburgh
http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/28/tesla-prices-ipo-at-17-per-share/
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marciovm123
The market cap is much more instructive to have in the title - price per share
by itself carries no information.

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MJR
It does if you're trying to figure out how many shares you can buy. It's also
of note because $17 is higher than the planned $14-16 range.

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eru
Number of shares I can buy carries no information. Percentage of the company
that I can own for x dollars carries some information.

Although if you already knew about the earlier plans you mention, than the new
17$ per share is news. (I was not that informed.)

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gamble
Much as I like the Roadster, I'm extremely pessimistic about Tesla's chances.
Established auto companies with much deeper pockets would have trouble
bringing the Model S to market. Tesla hasn't been very successful selling the
Roadster, a car whose $100k price tag ensures it's selling to a demographic
that doesn't care about service, warranty, or battery-replacement costs. The
Model S will be an order of magnitude more difficult to sell, even assuming
they meet their own overly-optimistic development schedule.

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pmccool
Seems like a good time to try their luck though. Demand for non-petroleum
powered cars is building, nobody is established as a manufacturer and it seems
the technology is now up to the job. It's still a gamble, but the odds seem a
bit better than usual.

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whatusername
$1.5 Billion Market Cap. Will be interesting to see where it is in a week.

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eru
I don't really get why anybody plans any IPO prices. Shouldn't auctions be the
best tool for the current owners to get as much money as they can?

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ars
They actually are auctions, just not public ones. Silent auctions, where the
bidders communicate privately with the seller.

The buyers set a price they will pay, possibly a price x number of shares
matrix.

Then the company picks a price to maximize the amount brought in.

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eru
But why did the share price then go up on the first day after the IPO? (And
why does it tend to do this for a lot of companies?)

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hop
Massive competition from many established companies, $300M+ tooling costs to
roll out a new car, low profit margins, high marketing costs, long sales
cycles, etc... Auto manufactuing is a bad business to be in, maybe second only
to operating airlines. And Tesla owns no special ip on their battery tech,
they will likely have to do a lot of dilution in the future to stay alive.
That said, I wish them luck, and if anyone can do it, it's Elon Musk.

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po
I really like Tesla (the company) but I would avoid Tesla (the stock). You're
buying an awful lot of risk for that price. In fact I would be surprised if
there weren't already significant amount of short sellers interested in this.

