The first week of October has been a crummy one for the IPO market. Six offerings went live this week, but the deals were fairly lackluster, marked by sad performances like LifeLock (NYSE:LOCK) dropping by 9% and Berry Plastics Group (NYSE:BERY) shedding 5%.
Worse yet: We were supposed to see seven deals.
Today, Dave & Buster’s withdrew its IPO. The company, which operates large restaurant/video arcades, wanted to issue 7.7 million shares at a range of $12 to $14, but investors weren’t biting. The CEO blamed “continued volatility.”
Not that there hasn’t been volatility in the markets, but it’s a convenient excuse. As InvestorPlace’s Will Ashworth pointed out, Dave & Buster’s has had trouble with finding ways to grow.
The IPO market did have one bright spot of note: Fleetmatics (NYSE:FLTX), which operates a cloud-based platform that helps manage commercial vehicle fleets.
The company issued 7.8 million shares at $17, which was at the top of the $15 to $17 range. So far in today’s trading, the stock price is up 31%.
Fleetmatics charges is customers subscriptions, which grew by 42.7% in 2011 to $92.3 million. Adjusted EBITDA came to $21.7 million.
And the market opportunity is large. According to a report from Frost and Sullivan, there are 18.5 million local commercial fleet vehicles in the U.S. and Canada; Fleetmatics currently has deployments across just 281,000 vehicles.
Tom Taulli runs the InvestorPlace blog IPOPlaybook, a site dedicated to the hottest news and rumors about initial public offerings. He is also the author of “How to Create the Next Facebook.” Follow him on Twitter at @ttaulli. As of this writing, he did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.
A long-time follower of the IPO scene, back in 1999 Tom started one of the first sites in the space called WebIPO. It was a place where investors got research as well as access to deals for the dot-com boom. Tom also wrote the top-selling book, Investing in IPOs. In it, he covers all the aspects of analyzing an IPO, such as reading the prospectus, detecting the risk factors and understanding some of the arcane regulations. But don’t worry — if that process is too intimidating for you, thankfully Tom will do the legwork for you right here in the IPO Playbook blog.
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