Motricity priced their initial public offering (IPO) (final prospectus) this past Thursday evening with disappointing results. Motricity provides wireless carriers and large corporate customers a wide variety of white label mobile applications and related services. Applications include mobile storefronts and associated content management, mobile search and mobile marketing. Motricity generally hosts their applications on behalf of their customers and currently manages applications with over 35 million active users per month across multiple carriers and geographies. Motricity is notable in that they were one of the early independent vendors providing applications to wireless carriers and large corporate customers. They have historically competed with Amdocs, Sybase (recently agreed to be acquired by SAP), OpenMarket, Ericsson and a variety of other vendors to a lesser extent.
Motricity has gone through a wide variety of ups and downs since its founding and it’s debatable as to whether an IPO was the optimal path for the company at this time. However, with hundreds of millions invested in Motricity since its founding, liquidity was high on the mind of its investors. The IPO market has generally been challenging over the past few months as we’ve highlighted before, and remains so. Motricity started its two week roadshow with institutional investors with the hope to sell 6.8mm shares at a price between $14.00 – $16.00 per share. The end result was a substantially smaller offering of 5mm shares at $10.00. Predictably with such a weak showing, the newly public shares slipped below the offering price.