The Weibo Corporation and the Sabre Corporation may have scaled back ambitions for their initial public offerings, but the cautious approach helped them.
Shares in both Weibo, one of China’s largest microblogging services, and Sabre, the big travel technology services provider, rose in their first day of trading on Thursday. Weibo’s stock was up more than 27 percent in late afternoon trading while Sabre’s was up 4 percent.
But the jumps in stock price came after both priced their offerings fairly low, as well as reduced the number of shares sold in their I.P.O.s. Weibo set its offering at $17 a share, the low end of its expected range, while Sabre priced its stock sale at $16 a share, $2 below expectations.
Both companies made their trading debuts during one of the roughest times for new stock sales in weeks, as shareholders have shown ambivalence about riskier investments. Until earlier this month, I.P.O.s had been on a tear, with many offerings pricing above expectations and then trading even better once they made their official market debut.
As investors began to fall out of love with fast-growing sectors like Internet and biotechnology, however, many prospective I.P.O.s began to falter as well, sending indexes like the Nasdaq in free fall on some days. An index of shares in newly public companies created by Renaissance Capital is down more than 1 percent so far this year.
Thomas Klein, Sabre’s chief executive, said in an interview that he wasn’t surprised about the change in investor sentiment since his company first filed a prospectus in January. Still, he added that the travel services provider viewed its listing as the first step in a long-term journey toward becoming a public company after seven years of ownership by private equity firms.
“We were pleased with the decision to change the size a little bit,†he said.
Some debutantes have performed well out of the gate. The food delivery company GrubHub priced its offering above an already heightened range and then shot up 31 percent in its first day of trading, for example. As of Thursday afternoon, it’s still up 38 percent over its offering price.
Others had to take a lower price in their I.P.O., as well as scale back the number of shares sold, to ensure that the first day of trading went smoothly. Two days ago, the boutique investment bank Moelis & Company priced its offering $1 below its range and trimmed the size of its stock sale; it was rewarded with a 4.6 percent pop in its debut on Wednesday. (It was still trading above its offer price as of Thursday afternoon.)
“We thought that’s probably where the world had moved,†Kenneth D. Moelis, the bank’s founder, told DealBook at the time.
