Groupon?s IPO Valuation Could End Up Being Less Than $6 Billion

It was only about six months ago that investor excitement for a Groupon IPO was so high that its expected valuation was $25 billion. Now, institutional investors are wary. A fund manager quoted in a Bloomberg report today suggests that Groupon might have to reduce its IPO valuation to between $3 billion and $5 billion in order to get it out the door. That valuation would be below the $6 billion acquisition offer Groupon turned down from Google last year. Another fund manager says that Groupon may have to delay its IPO further or even pull it. All of this goes to show that six months can be an eternity when it comes to the IPO window. Since the days not so long ago when nobody blinked at its proposed $25 billion valuation, Groupon has taken a beating for some of its accounting practices, cash burn rate, and other financial details revealed in its SEC filings, which have been revised several times. Last month, it restated the way it accounts for revenues to a more conservative set of numbers, and announced that it lost its second COO in less than a year. And of course, the overall market's downward spiral isn't helping matters any.

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