Coming back to Earth after an impressive blast off.
Shares of Firefly Aerospace (FLY) dropped more than 10% in pre-market trading on Friday.
The stock opened at $70 a share on its IPO day on Thursday, and closed the session at $60.35 — up 34% from its IPO price of $45. The company’s market cap at the end of its first day of trading stood at $8.48 billion.
Just last week, Firefly said it had planned to sell 16.2 million shares at a range of $35 to $39. A new regulatory filing on Monday came with a much higher range of $41 to $43. The company ended up raising $868 million from the IPO after selling 19.3 million shares at $45.
The strong reception followed fellow space exploration play Karman’s (KRMN) impressive start to the public markets this year. Its stock is up around 60% since its February debut. Both names benefiting from investor appetite to play the next space in public markets as SpaceX is a private company owned by Elon Musk.
“This company is not aspirational — it’s operational,” Firefly CEO Jason Kim told me on Yahoo Finance. An electrical engineer, Kim joined Firefly in October 2024 from Boeing’s (BA) satellite segment, Millennium Space Systems.
Kim declined to put a timeline on when Firefly would turn a profit.
Firefly is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Its lunar lander Blue Ghost successfully touched down on the surface of the moon in March. The company’s new Eclipse reusable rocket is expected to launch sometime in 2026, joining the already proven Alpha rocket in the portfolio.
Firefly remains an early-stage company, as its prospectus makes clear. The company boasts $1.1 billion in backlog, essentially business that may (or may not) become sales in the future.
It also lists partnerships with Elon Musk’s SpaceX (SPAX.PVT), Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, NASA, Northrop Grumman (NOC), and Space Force.
But the business is likely to lose money for the foreseeable future as it builds out technical capabilities and looks to generate profitable demand for its rockets.
For the six months ended June 30, Firefly estimated in its prospectus that it will lose between $95 million and $97 million on an adjusted operating basis. That would be on sales of $70.4 million to $71.4 million.
Firefly posted an adjusted operating loss of $190.6 million in 2024, up from a $123.9 million loss in 2023.
Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance’s Executive Editor and a member of Yahoo Finance’s editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.
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