AOL Returns To Wall Street Spotlight With IPO Of New Corporate Parent Bending Spoons
A quarter-century after it swallowed Time Warner in one of history’s splashiest and most ill-fated mergers, AOL returned to the Wall Street spotlight Wednesday with a new corporate parent, Bending Spoons.
The Milan, Italy-based company had its initial public offering on the Nasdaq, with shares rising 40% to finish at $40.50. The IPO raised about $1 billion for the company, with additional proceeds going to shareholders.
Founded in 2013 and valued at about $11 billion based on its most recent financing round, Bending Spoons owns a portfolio of more than 50 digital companies. The roster includes AOL, Eventbrite, Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer and Meetup. Collectively, the brands have about 500 million monthly active users.
In the first quarter, Bending Spoons reported total revenue of $601.3 million, up from $248.9 million in the year-earlier period. It posted $27.5 million in net profit, reversing a year-ago loss of $112.2 million.
The strategy of growing via acquisitions, co-founder Matteo Danieli said at a Nasdaq opening bell ringing ceremony, “has given us the opportunity to reinvent iconic digital products.”
Bending Spoons spent nearly $1.5 billion to acquire AOL last fall from Yahoo, which is largely backed by private equity giant Apollo. While the deal valuation prompted some raised eyebrows from investors more familiar with the service’s dial-up heritage and role in the Time Warner fiasco, AOL has shown surprising resilience. Its main website saw a 20% gain in traffic over the past year among users aged 25 to 54. Along with ad revenue, it makes money by selling a range of services, including protection against identity theft and malware attacks.
“Déjà vu all over again!” AOL co-founder Steve Case posted in a message on X. “AOL went public in 1992 (first Internet IPO) at a market value of $70 million. Rose to $160 billion 7 years later, at peak of the dot com mania. Then started a sad decline. Glad to see AOL is now public again … Hoping for the best!”
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