‘To be in this spot, so many things had to go right,’ Qualtrics co-founder Ryan Smith says
Qualtrics International Inc. burst out of the gate in its public debut Thursday, closing 52% above its initial public offering price, at $45.50, on the Nasdaq exchange.
The enterprise-software spinoff of SAP SAP, -1.32%, newly anointed under the ticker XM, +51.67%, opened at $41.85 per share after being priced late Wednesday at $30 a share — above the expected range of between $27 and $29 a share.
Its closing stock price Thursday values Qualtrics at $27.3 billion.
“It’s been an interesting journey: To go from being sold in a record $8 billion deal to SAP three days before we were to go public [in 2018] to this is incredible,” Qualtrics co-founder Ryan Smith told MarketWatch in a phone interview shortly before the first trade at 1:55 p.m. ET.
Smith, who bought a majority stake of the NBA’s Utah Jazz for $1.66 billion in October, started Qualtrics with his brother, Jared, and father, Scott, in 2002. “SAP hooked us up for one-and-a-half, two years, to take our company and product everywhere, and let us run it independently with the same management team. This is really unusual,” he said.
“To be in this spot [going public as Utah’s latest tech success story], so many things had to go right,” Smith said. “Incredible.”
The unconventional path to an IPO was renewed in July, when SAP said it would spin out Qualtrics while retaining most of its ownership.
Qualtrics, whose software lets businesses gauge how customers use their products so those products can be improved, has about 13,000 customers from about 9,000 two years ago. The company’s sales jumped 30% in the first three quarters of 2020 to $550 million, from $413.4 million a year earlier.
Excluding costs tied to stock compensation, Qualtrics recorded an operating loss of $24.9 million through September of last year.
Smith, a self-avowed basketball junkie, says he splits his time between Qualtrics during the day and NBA action at night. The Jazz have won 10 games in a row, and sport the league’s best record (14-4).