Ramin Talaie/Bloomberg NewsPandora Media’s top executives, Joseph Kennedy, left, and Tim Westergren, on hand at the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday for their company’s market debut.
The market debut of Pandora Media, the online music service, provided a bright spot on Wednesday on an otherwise grim day on Wall Street. But Pandora failed to match the first-day performance of two other Internet stars, LinkedIn and Yandex.
Pandora’s shares closed at $17.42, a gain of 8.9 percent over its initial public offering price of $16. The stock did open at $20 and spiked as high as $26 in the morning before trailing off. At the close, Pandora had a total market value of nearly $2.8 billion.
Weighing on Pandora, however, was a stock market sell-off, as the main market indicators dropped 1.5 to 1.7 percent on increasing investor worries about European debt problems, especially those in Greece.
At $16, Pandora did price its shares well above its I.P.O. target price of $10 to $12. The performance of its stock on Wednesday could be an indication that its underwriters succeeded in pricing the issue closer to market, leaving less money on the table after the initial public offering.
In contrast to Pandora’s gain, LinkedIn’s shares more than doubled on their first day of trading in May, while shares of Yandex, considered the Google of Russia, jumped more than 55 percent in its market debut.
On Wednesday, LinkedIn fell $1.72, or 2.3 percent, to $74.62, while Yandex dropped $1.33, or 4.2 percent, to $30.27. Still, both issues remain comfortably above their initial public offering prices.
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