YY Inc. (Nasdaq: YY) picked an interesting day to come public, but maybe it is because the company is Chinese. The social platform provider priced its initial public offering of 7.8 million American depositary shares at $10.50 per share. The total offering size was $81.9 million before the effects of any overallotment option. This IPO was at the low-end of the $10.50 to $12.50 indicated price range.

Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank Securities, and Citigroup were the joint bookrunners; Pacific Crest Securities and Piper Jaffray & Co. were the co-managers for the IPO. YY granted the underwriters a 30-day overallotment option to purchase up to an additional 1.17 million shares.

YY calls itself “a revolutionary rich communication social platform that engages users in real-time online group activities through voice, text and video” which was launched back in July of 2008. The company claims that as of September 30, 2012, its YY Client had 400.5 million registered user accounts. It also claimed that in the first nine months of 2012 its users spent 393 billion voice minutes on the YY Client.

These ADSs did price at the lower end of its expected price range, but shares are up after opening for trading. The stock is listed as opening at $10.69 and shares are up about 10% at $11.55 on 2.2 million shares.

Picking the day before Thanksgiving to come public is not a normal or routine event. We would usually ask “Why, Why?” would a company come public on this day.

JON C. OGG

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