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Dingdong’s app allows people in China to buy fresh produce, meat, seafood, and other daily necessities.
Dreamstime
Dingdong, the first of the week’s roughly 16 initial public offerings, began trading Tuesday after cutting, and then increasing, the size of its deal.
Shares of Dingdong (ticker: DDL) opened at $28, peaked at $29.99, and recently changed hands at $27.54, up 17% from its offer price.
The Shanghai company raised about $96 million after selling 4.07 million American depositary shares at $23.50, the bottom of the range it had told investors to expect. Each two ADS represent three class A ordinary shares.
Dingdong filed to offer 14 million ADS at $23.50 to $25.50 earlier this month, but slashed the total to 3.7 million on Monday. The company then boosted the size of its deal to 4.07 million ADS on Tuesday.
Morgan Stanley,
BofA Securities, and Credit Suisse Securities are underwriters on the deal.
Roughly 16 companies are expected to go public this week, including Krispy Kreme, the doughnut chain, and Didi Global, the so-called
Uber Technologies
(ticker: UBER) of China. Dingdong is the first of the group to list its shares.
Dingdong is an on-demand e-commerce company in China. Through its mobile app, Dingdong users in that country can buy fresh produce, meat, seafood, and other daily necessities.
Dingdong isn’t profitable. Losses widened to $1.4 billion Chinese yuan ($211.4 million) for the quarter ended March 31 from losses of 244.5 million yuan for the same period in 2020. Revenue rose 46% to 3.8 billion yuan, according to the prospect for the deal.
Dingdong raised $700 million in funding in April, according to Reuters. The startup is backed by frequent technology investors
SoftBank Group,
Tiger Global Management, and General Atlantic.
The Dingdong IPO comes less than a week since
Missfresh
(MF), a Beijing online grocery startup, raised $273 million. Shares of Missfresh dropped nearly 33% from the $13 offer price during its first day of trading.
Write to Luisa Beltran at luisa.beltran@dowjones.com