- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday March 14 2000 13.14 GMT
In the event, it was nothing much out of the ordinary. After months of hype and anticipation, in the face of warning after warning that this could be the one to prick the so-called dot.com bubble, share trading in the online retailer Lastminute.com finally kicked off this morning.
The stock market did not crash. Stockbrokers did not find their websites and phone switchboards jammed by thousands of frenzied speculators. In fact, it was very much like any other day on the London stock market.
As expected, shares in Lastminute - which began offering cheap flights on the web before branching out to selling everything from chocolates to theatre tickets to panic purchases - went up. Against a flotation price of 380p, the shares were trading at 520p by mid-morning, valuing this 19-month-old company at a cool £680m.
This might have been considered a disappointment when the "grey market" operated by financial spread betting firms was suggesting until today that Lastminute might be worth £1bn once dealing got under way. But a first morning premium of 40% will probably be considered the perfect price move by Lastminute's financial advisers, the US investment bank Morgan Stanley. It is not so high that the media start banging on about greedy investors and not so low that market pundits begin questioning whether Lastminute.com really is the quite the extraordinary investment it was cracked up to be.
The only disappointment was for the 250,000 private investors who applied for shares in the flotation. A quarter of the company - 33m shares - was being offered for sale, and the bulk of these shares were destined for the big institutional investors, such as pension funds.
Usually in such cases of huge oversubscription, when a company joining the stock market suddenly captures the public's imagination, investors' applications go into a ballot so that just a portion of applicants each get a reasonable number of shares.
Lastminute wanted to avoid going down this road, worried that disappointed investors would become disaffected customers of the website. But trying to keep everyone happy means that each of the 250,000 applicants is receiving just 35 shares. These were worth £133 at the flotation price and £182 at lunchtime today.
As for the founders of the business, 31-year-old Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox, 27, their own paper wealth now stands at around £300m - although from the slightly forced professionalism the two entrepreneurs were showing this morning as they faced the TV cameras, the money has not changed them too dramatically just yet.
Their job - justifying the £680m stock market value placed on a business which turned over little more than £400,000 last year - has only just begun.
Useful links
<A HREF="http://www.lastminute.com" TARGET="_new"Lastminute.com
Lastminute flotation soars ahead
Special report: floating the net
