Daily deal website Groupon filed for a $750 million initial public offering (IPO) on June 2. The company said in documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that it plans to go public “as soon as practicable after this registration statement becomes effective.”
Groupon generated $713.4 million in revenue in 2010, a 2,247% increase from 2009, according to SEC filings. In the first quarter of 2011, the company saw year-over-year revenue growth of 1,357% to $644.7 million. However, it has yet to report a full-year profit, registering a net income loss of $413.4 million in 2010.
Between January 1, 2009, and March 31, 2010, 15.8 million consumers purchased deals through Groupon, according to the filing.
“On the day of this writing, Groupon’s over 7,000 employees offered more than 1,000 daily deals to 83 million subscribers across 43 countries and have sold to date over 70 million Groupons,” said Groupon founder and CEO Andrew Mason, in a letter to potential shareholders included with the filing. “Reaching this scale in about 30 months required a great deal of operating flexibility, dating back to Groupon’s founding.”
The Groupon filing comes amid debate among industry analysts over whether the technology market is in a bubble, similar to the dot-com bubble that burst in 2000. The May IPO of social networking site LinkedIn valued the company at $8.9 billion.
Last week, Google debuted its daily deals service, Google Offers. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company reportedly tried to purchase Groupon late last year.
