GoPro goes public: How 3 tech companies fared after going public

An iPhone shows the Twitter and Facebook apps, among others. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

GoPro Inc. made a splashy Wall Street debut on Thursday, with investors pushing shares of the wearable-camera maker up more than 30 per cent.

The California-based GoPro, which specializes in cameras and accessories that are used by extreme sports junkies to handily document their adventures, was valued at approximately $3 billion at its initial public offering. The company, which had the bestselling camcorder last year, was founded in 2004.

Here’s a look at how other tech and media pioneers are faring after their recent moves to the stock market:

Twitter

Hopes were high for Twitter when it launched its IPO at $26 per share last November, but the micro-blogging site’s stock has seen a slide, in keeping with a recent decline in tech stocks overall. Similar to GoPro, Twitter Inc. saw a major surge on its first day of trading. Shortly thereafter, its stock more than doubled, to $74.73 a share. That spurred its market value to approximately $50 billion, despite never having turned a profit since the company’s inception in 2006. But challenges lay ahead, and in recent months, Twitter has seen its stock plummet to more than half of its peak price.

Facebook

Despite an iffy public-trading start, Mark Zuckerberg’s college pet project-turned-social networking phenomenon has been holding its own. Earlier this year, Facebook was able to finance hefty acquisitions like mobile messaging service WhatsApp and virtual reality company Oculus with its own stock, which in April, had tripled in value since last summer.

Netflix

Online video service Netflix has seen steady growth since hitting the open market in 2002, despite unusual blips for the subscriber-based entertainment service. For example, following mixed reviews of the new episodes of “Arrested Development,” which were released all at once on Netflix in May 2013, stock value fell more than 6 per cent. Five months later, Netflix’s market value quadrupled, with stock rising nearly 11 per cent, to $393. In April, Netflix had seen a slide of 10 per cent in its stock value, despite increasing revenues, and more than 40 million subscribers around the world.

With files from The Associated Press