INTC Intel Corporation

By Austen Hufford 

Big-data software company Cloudera Inc. gave a price estimate for its initial public offering that values it as high as $1.79 billion, though the per-share price range is still well below levels previously paid for company stock.

Cloudera said 17.3 million shares of its common stock could be sold in the IPO for a price of between $12 and $14 a share. With 128 million shares outstanding expected after the offering, that values the company at between $1.54 billion and $1.79 billion.

When share options and restricted stock grants are included, the company could be valued at between $2 billion and $2.4 billion.The company filed its initial paperwork to go public late last month.

Still, the expected price is well below what was previously paid for Cloudera. Intel Corp., which owns 22% of the company as of January, paid $30.92 a share in 2014. In March, Cloudera granted stock awards to employees at $17.85 a share, according to filings. As of December, Cloudera's mutual-fund investors had marked down their estimated values of their shares to between $17 and $26, according to The Wall Street Journal's Startup Stock Tracker.

Cloudera also noted that big investor Intel is interested in buying up to 10% of its to-be-offered shares. At Cloudera's estimated price range, up to $241 million of shares would be sold during its IPO, and Intel's potential 10% stake would cost it up to $24 million.

A potential 10% purchase by Intel would help keep its stake in Cloudera from being diluted. Without the potential purchase, Intel's ownership would drop to 19% after the offering, but it would remain at around 21% if Intel did purchase the full 10%.

Cloudera, based in Palo Alto, Calif., sells software and services that help customers analyze oceans of digital information flowing from networked devices. Its technology is built upon an open-source project called Hadoop that was developed to store and run computing processes across many different computers.

Rolfe Winkler contributed to this article.

Write to Austen Hufford at austen.hufford@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 18, 2017 02:47 ET (06:47 GMT)

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