Uber is expected to set a price range of $44 to $50 per share in a supersize initial public offering (IPO) that could fill the money-losing ride-hailing company's coffers with as much as $10 billion in capital, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.
The offering could give Uber a market value of as much as $90 billion, putting the 10-year-old company in the upper echelons of publicly traded companies, Bloomberg reported. At that valuation, Uber would be worth more than the automakers Ford and Fiat Chrysler combined.
Uber, which publicly filed for its IPO on April 11, is expected to set an initial price range as soon as Friday, ahead of a planned road show to pitch the offering to investors.
Uber's IPO is the most highly anticipated of a crop of tech startups listing their shares on the public markets this year, including the social-networking firm Pinterest and the workplace messaging service Slack.
Uber's ride-hailing rival Lyft priced its March IPO at $72 per share for a $21 billion valuation, even though its first price range was $62 to $68. However, this has backfired as the company has since traded below its IPO price. By market's close on Thursday, Lyft shares were trading at $56.39.
Uber could raise between $8 billion and $10 billion in the public offering, according to the Bloomberg report, which added that the final details of that price range could still shift. Uber hasn't officially disclosed how many shares it will have outstanding after its IPO, so it's unclear how this price range values the company.
Though the first price range sets the tone of the conversation ahead of an IPO, all the big tech IPOs this year so far have gone public above their final range, including PagerDuty, Zoom, and Pinterest.
