Blankets of snow may have slowed much of the Northeast in January but the IPO fires have burned brightly.
Six new deals filed in the last two weeks including the much-anticipated LinkedIn as well as two others of special interest, Skullcandy and RPX Corp.
Five of the seven deals that priced in the last two weeks are names we will be adding to our IPO Candy ecosystem, including: Neilsen (NLSN), Demand Media (DMD), BCD Semiconductor (BCDS), Velti (VELT), and InterXion (INXN).
There are 17 deals in active marketing right now, ten of which we are following.
Performance
For the month of January, the IPO Candy ecosystem was up 3% on average compared to 2% for the S&P 500. The top 10 names were up 26% and the bottom 10 were down 18%.
We continue to be in a very favorable environment for stocks in general and IPOs in particular. Last year it was clear that investors were eager to find new names to invest in. Activity on secondary markets like SharesPost and Second Market has expanded dramatically.
Although there isn’t much we like about the ballyhooed “Startup America” plan, it does support our belief that we will see an opening up of capital markets for small companies and private investors. In the next few weeks we will be publishing a short overview of what that will mean for companies and investors.
Meanwhile, the tables below summarize the high and low points for IPO names in January.
| Top 5 for January | |||
| Company | Ticker | Gain | Area |
| TeleNav | TNAV | +44% | Mobile Navigation |
| Bona Film | BONA | +36% | China Film Distribution |
| Sky-Mobi | MOBI | +35% | China Wireless Software |
| Ancestry.com | ACOM | +26% | Online Genealogy Tools |
| NXP Semi | NXPI | +23% | Mixed Signal Semis |
SemiLEDS had a rough first quarterly report as a public company.
| Bottom 5 for January | |||
| Company | Ticker | Loss | Area |
| SemiLEDS | LEDS | -38% | LED Semiconductors |
| Ming Yang | MY | -20% | Wind Turbines |
| NOAH Hldngs | NOAH | -17% | China Financial Svcs |
| ZST Digital NW | ZSTN | -17% | China Cable EQ |
| Envestnet | ENV | -16% | Online Investment Svc |
See the IPO Candy Performance page below for more details.
Selected Company Morsels
Convio (CNVO), a fairly low profile provider of online marketing solutions for non-profits, acquired StrategicOne for $6M to add database marketing and analytic tools.
Motricity (MOTR), maker of mobile phone software, acquired Adenyo to provide mobile advertising services to carriers for $100M.
RealD (RLD) expanded their relationship with Regal Entertainment to add up to 1,500 more screens.
SolarWinds (SWI), a software company focused on management tools, acquired a small provider of virtualization control software.
TeleNav (TNAV) continued to expand their GPS and location software on mobile Internet platforms like Android.
IPO Candy Folio Update
The IPO Candy Folio has been growing and has attracted $3.5M of new investment assets since inception in August 2010.
We have not made adjustments to the portfolio since mid-December so it’s time to make a few changes:
Decreases
CBOE, 3% to 0%, no longer interesting
ACOM, 5% to 4%, taking profits
SPSC, 6% to 3%, limited upside
BITA, 3% to 2%, taking profits
QNST, 4% to 2%, taking profits
MDMD, 4% to 2%, lockup coming off
Increases
Cash goes from 3% to 9% of portfolio value.
New Positions
LEDS, 3%, Chinese LED Maker, missed quarter
MOBI, 3%, Mobile Internet SW in China
The Pipeline
As noted, the pipeline is full and building for a busy February. We expect LinkedIn and Skullcandy to be two of the more interesting deals. There’s a heavy weighting of deals in biotechnology and healthcare. See the updated pipeline table in the IPO Candy Ecosystem for more details.
Coverage and the Calendar
The coverage calendar is fairly quiet but there is an avalanche of earnings reports on the way from almost all the companies in the ecosystem in the next two weeks.
Several stocks have exited or will be coming off lockup agreements. These include RealPage (RP), MakeMyTrip (MMYT), MediaMind (MDMD), IntraLinks (IL) and NXP Semiconductors (NXPI).
