Corel began trading on the Nasdaq Wednesday, April 26 and finished down 2.1% from its IPO price of $16 per share.
Corel was bought by Vector Capital in 2003, which took it private before offering it publicly again recently. They own 72% after the recent offering. Corel makes CorelDraw and WordPerfect of course (now called bundled with other productivity software and called WordPerfect Office), as well as Paint Shop Pro due to their purchase of Jasc Software in 2004, and also WinZip, as a result of the 2003 Vector acquisition.
The stock is probably going to have limited success, since competition is tight in the mature packaged software industry and no dividends will be paid to the new investors in the company.
Back in the days of fantasy stock markets – playing that game in school in the 90’s – Corel always turned out to be a disaster. So yeah, I’m not surprised.
I was doing one of those back in ’94 I think and picked up some Compaq. Won the competition based on its growth primarily.