Rackspace Stock Plummets on First Day of Trading

Investors didn’t exactly scoop up shares of Rackspace stock during the company’s first day of trading.

It was a bit of an inauspicious IPO for Rackspace, which saw its stock nosedive.

Rackspace Technology set the price at $21 a share, and the initial public offering raised $704 million. However, the stock price fell more than 20% Wednesday, to $16.17 a share. According to Fortune, Rackspace’s previous IPO tanked in its first day of trading back in 2008.

Last month, the managed cloud computing company filed its statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission proposing the IPO of its common stock.

On Wednesday, Rackspace announced the pricing of its IPO of 33.5 million shares of common stock. In addition, it granted the underwriters a 30-day option to buy up to an additional 5 million shares of stock at the IPO price, less underwriting discounts and commissions.

The IPO means Rackspace is public less than four years after going private. Apollo Global Management acquired the company in November 2016.

The shares are trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “RXT.”

Big Shift to Multicloud

Matt Stoyka is Rackspace’s chief solutions officer.

“The industry is in the middle of a tectonic shift towards multicloud,” he said. “We are the leading pure play multicloud solutions company and we’ve seen tremendous growth in our business, achieving four record-breaking sales quarters in a row. Rackspace has 95% recurring revenue. And we are extremely profitable and have great cash flow. With this profile, this company is well positioned to excel in the public markets.”

The IPO isn’t likely to impact Rackspace’s partner relationships, Stoyka said.

“We work hard alongside our partners every day, and aim to be the best partner to them and to our customers,” he said. “We will continue to take a programmatic and intentional approach when working with our partners. We will also continue to innovate alongside with our partners to bring the greatest value to our customers.”

The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating Rackspace customers’ journey to the cloud, Stoyka said.

“We launched five solutions focused around remote work, security, cloud performance and cost optimization, and data center management to help customers solve their business continuity challenges,” he said. “We’re continuing to see increased demand for four key needs: cost savings, ability to scale up and down, security, and speed and agility. We expect that migrations to the cloud and other IT shifts will accelerate cloud infrastructure investments in the next six months.”

Rackspace has been working closely with its partners to identify ways to help customers during the pandemic, Stoyka said.

“Work-from-home solutions built on AWS and Azure are examples of this, as is extending our security services to any environment due in part to our partnership with Armor,” he said.