Online retailer Wish, which provides an e-commerce platform for unbranded merchandise, on Friday filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to secure up to $1 billion in an initial public offering, joining the rush of consumer tech companies seeking to list on the stock market before the end of the year.
Based on the SEC filing, the Silicon Valley retail unicorn seeks to join NASDAQ under the symbol WISH. J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America are leading the IPO for Wish parent company, ContextLogic. Other entities include Citigroup, UBS Group, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse Group and RBC Capital Markets.
The filing by ContextLogic indicated that the platform is looking to expand the e-commerce business which up to now has been linking merchants based primarily in mainland China with consumers around the globe. Wish disclosed it had around 108 million active users per month at the end of September, in more than 100 countries to over half a million merchants offering around 150 million items.
The San Francisco, California-headquartered company -- founded in 2010 by chief executive officer Peter Szulczewski and Danny Zhangand -- posted $2.3 billion in revenues for the four quarters ended September 30, 2020. It registered a loss of $120 million in the last three months on $1.7 billion sales.
While Wish filed confidential documents for its initial public bid in August, this is the first opportunity that prospective investors have had to evaluate the company's financial performance. Wish's losses, including its revenues, have grown during the global health crisis, the filing shows.
Home-rental group Airbnb, food delivery company DoorDash, online loan provider Affirm and video-game platform Roblox have all filed this month to go public.
A global online marketplace, Wish connects sellers to potential buyers of all kinds of products from athletic apparel to home decor and cosmetics. ContextLogic owns other online marketplaces, including Mama, Home and Cute, and Geek, the Wish website shows.
Wish is the third largest eCommerce marketplace in the United States in terms of revenues and was the most downloaded shopping app globally in 2018. Its IPO shows that more than 70 percent of the revenues on its platform do not involve a search query.
According to the company's IPO filing, in order to enhance user engagement, Wish incorporates "fresh gamified features, rich user-generated content including videos, images, and reviews, and a wide host of relevant products to make shopping more entertaining," Tech Explore quoted the filing as saying.
