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posted by martyb on Sunday June 16 2019, @01:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the losing-money-on-every-sale-but-will-make-it-up-with-volume dept.

Chewy raises $1 billion in IPO

It will rain cats and dogs on Wall Street Friday: Online pet supplies retailer Chewy is set to make its debut. And it should be a strong one. Chewy, which was bought by retailer PetSmart in 2017 for nearly $3.4 billion in 2017, priced its initial public offering Thursday at $22 a share. That's above the expected range and values Chewy at $8.8 billion. The company will raise $1 billion from the stock sale and will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol CHWY.

Chewy is growing rapidly, despite competitive threats from Amazon (AMZN) as well as food giant General Mills (GIS), which recently acquired pet food seller Blue Buffalo.

Sales soared 68% last year to more than $3.5 billion. But the company is still losing money. It reported a net loss of $268 million in 2018, following a $338 million loss a year earlier.

Unicorn meat.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Sunday June 16 2019, @03:15PM (3 children)

    by Hyperturtle (2824) on Sunday June 16 2019, @03:15PM (#856250)

    Chewy.com has sent me endless postal mailings and emails, trying to entice me to buy products for pets that... are of a different species than what I have.

    All sorts of dogs and cat stuff, yet... they don't seem to have determined what type of pets I would actually buy stuff for. Heck, I even could be miscontrued as a lizard-keeper due to my needing to feed the carnivorous plants throughout the year.

    But they do not--they relentlessly try to market dog toys, cat scratching posts, and scientifically balanced diets for elderly dogs and treats for kittens. It's like a shotgun approach where nothing hits.

    Don't ask me if their inability to target part of the audience properly is going to affect them in the long run; it doesn't seem to matter to wall street that the spam they send is ineffectual and has angered me to the extent I am not likely to ever shop there. They even send coupons for dog and cat food; it reminds me of the old days when a company would plaster a community with coupons in the hope that half of the recipients are applicable and maybe half a percent of them would switch to their brand and redeem a coupon to do it, and have no real methods to determine the metrics of success.

    We have an internet and multicore processors now. It is probably not a good sign that Chewy hasn't figured out how to market to an applicable audience yet. But maybe they just will blow the money on purpose and enrich the corporate staff and go out of business like pets.com did. It's not like the corporate staff had to pay much of anything back to wall street; money was almost free in the heady days of the dot com IPO rush... seems sort of familiar doesn't it?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @03:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @03:27PM (#856253)

    Those were my first thoughts too, it seems too obvious though.

  • (Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Sunday June 16 2019, @08:39PM

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Sunday June 16 2019, @08:39PM (#856334)

    You misunderstand. They want you to buy a cat. And a dog. And a smart phone while you are at it. Then buy all of the crap that goes along with them. You will be assimilated.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday June 16 2019, @09:13PM

    by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Sunday June 16 2019, @09:13PM (#856339)

    Frankly, I'm happier when a company is not making efforts to target me for advertising. That hopefully means they are not collecting data on me. I do dislike the fact Chewy automatically save your payment information, once my order is charged I have to log in to delete the information, but it seems just about every company is pulling that crap these days. I can order from them and within two days receive my order, and it has not been wrong yet. If you search the site you'll find they have something for just about any pet, and the prices are better than any stores I've been in.