E-commerce firm Wish sees shares fall 5% in market debut

Shopping app Wish’s parent company ContextLogic Inc saw its share price fall more than 5% in its trading debut on Wednesday, after raising $1.1 billion in an initial public offering (IPO).

The San Francisco-based firm sold 46 million shares at the top end of its $22 to $24 target range. The stock opened at $22.75 on the Nasdaq, yielding a market value of $13.34 billion.

The lackluster debut comes after mega-IPOs and stellar first-day pops of companies including Airbnb Inc, DoorDash Inc and SnowFlake Inc.

ContextLogic was founded in 2010 by Chief Executive Peter Szulczewski, formerly of Google, and Yahoo veteran Danny Zhang. Its Wish app is known for selling bargains from China and boasts 100 million monthly active users globally.

“We are investing in logistics, scaling the team on a global basis, looking for new revenue streams and improving our customer experience, which is more like (social media app) TikTok for shopping,” Szulczewski said in an interview.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a surge in online shopping as consumers stayed at home, but also brought disruption to supply chains. In July-September, Wish booked $606 million in revenue, up 33%, and a net loss of $99 million.

The company is expanding local warehouses to better control shipping times and bundling orders to cut shipping costs for the 2 million products sold per day.

Hans Tung, managing partner at early Wish investor GGV Capital, said the success of dollar stores highlights the potential of an e-commerce platform focusing on less affluent consumers.

“Many of our consumers are willing to wait if the price is better. We’re taking a differentiated approach,” said Tung. “We still have a lot more room to grow in the U.S. and the penetration in emerging markets is pretty early.”

Other investors include Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, General Atlantic and DST Global.
Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and BofA Securities were lead underwriters for the IPO.