Early Trading For Dutch Review Site Trustpilot Up 11 Pct Over IPO Price

The consumer review website Trustpilot surged as trading began on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) following the Dutch company’s initial public offering (IPO), Bloomberg reported.

In early-morning London trading on Tuesday (March 23), Trustpilot’s stock traded at 295 pence, up 11 percent from the IPO’s price per share of 265 pence, which was the upper end of the price range. The IPO, which offered a 44 percent stake, sets the company’s valuation at £1.08 billion ($1.5 billion). The company’s IPO raised £473 million ($655 million).

Trustpilot’s investors raised almost £427 million via the sell-off of 161 million existing shares in the IPO. The offering could raise around £544 million if an option to sell additional shares from existing investors is fully exercised, per Bloomberg.

Several investment firms agreed to acquire a bulk of the shares — BlackRock Inc., FIL Investments International, Caledonia Investments, Capital Research Global Investors, Adelphi Capital and Janus Henderson Group, according to Bloomberg.

Investors showed strong demand for Trustpilot’s offering, as Bloomberg noted that the IPO order book covered within about 1.5 hours after it was opened last week. In addition, Trustpilot increased the total size of the offering by as much as 15 million shares on Friday (March 19).

The Copenhagen-headquartered free independent review platform was launched in 2007 by Peter H. Mühlmann. By the end of last year, the site had over 120 million reviews across more than 270,000 domains. Company revenue increased 25 percent in 2020, reaching $101.9 million. Losses last year declined to $12.2 million from $22.7 million in 2019.

Customer reviews help drive or kill sales for many businesses, but restaurants are particularly vulnerable to the raves and complaints that people post online. Digital menus and reviews are essential to consumers’ decisions of where to dine. About 90 percent of consumers said in January that they researched reviews before choosing a place to eat. As PYMNTS reported in June, the COVID-19 pandemic proved to be a boon for businesses offering fast, easy ordering tools