DDC - DDC Enterprise IPO Fails To Whet Investor Appetites On Wall Street | Benzinga
Key Takeaways:
- Shares of DDC Enterprise, also known as DayDayCook, priced below their earlier indicated range and fell 27% on their New York trading debut
- The Chinese cooking company is repositioning itself as a global supplier of Asian food and content with a series of recent acquisitions
By Edith Terry
It was hoping Wall Street would gobble up its shares, but DDC Enterprise Ltd. (NYSE: DDC) discovered a distinct lack of investor appetite instead.
The Shanghai-based seller of Asian prepared foods and cooking content, also known as DayDayCook, made one of the biggest IPOs by an Asian company in New York this year, raising about $33.15 million with a sale of 3.9 million shares last Friday. The amount was far shy of the $44.6 million it originally targeted, as the final $8.50 share price came in even lower than the original price range of $9.50 and $11.50 from the company’s latest prospectus filed Nov. 8.
But that was just a hint of things to come, as DayDayCook’s stock fell by nearly 27% on its first trading day, and shed another 16% the next, to close Tuesday at $5.21. The company now has a market value of just $120 million, about a third of the estimated HK$3 billion ($384.2 million) it was worth when it first signaled its intent to list in New York in in June 2022.
Perhaps investors simply tired of waiting for this particular deal.
DayDayCook first tried to list more than two years ago in August 2021 through a merger with a Nasdaq-traded special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). But it abruptly cancelled the deal a year later, and in October last year made its first public filing for a more traditional IPO on the NYSE American Exchange. The deal took ...