Checking Up On The Largest IPO Of 2008
May 24, 2009 by Tisa Silver
Filed under Finance
Last year, Visa completed one of the largest initial public offerings (IPOs) in history. According to Wikipedia, the Visa IPO is second in size only to the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (known as ICBC) which went public in 2006.
How is Visa today? Let’s revisit the IPO first.
Photo by DeclanTM, courtesy of flickr
Visa Inc. (Ticker: V) completed the largest IPO of 2008, coming in at $17.9 billion.
Investors who were able to get in on this deal paid $44 per share. Within two months, Visa’s shares were approaching double the IPO price.
The stock has since retreated and on Friday, closed at $65.75. Even still, Friday’s price represents just under a 50 percent return for the initial investors.
Obviously, Visa has had a good year, and has managed to easily beat all of the major indexes. (View the chart)
BTW- The company got some good news earlier this week: JPMorgan is shifting its debit cards (acquired via the purchase of Washington Mutual) from MasterCard to Visa. According to Bloomberg, the switch will cost MasterCard about half of its U.S. debit card portfolio.
