As Snowflake prepares to go public with its upcoming IPO, Warren Buffett's holding company Berkshire Hathaway has revealed its possibilities to invest more than €750 million in the cloud computing company. As first reported by the Financial Times, the company's IPO filing update valued the company at €23.7 billion and Berkshire Hathaway plans to buy €250 million worth of shares directly from the company at the time of its public offering. initial. At the same time, Buffett's holding company will also buy another block of shares worth more than €320 million from one of Snowflake's investors. Calling itself "The Cloud Data Platform," Snowflake aims to change the way companies approach data lakes, data analytics, and data storage. The company launched in 2012 and already has large customers using its cloud data services, including Sony, Adobe, Capital One, and others. Through its IPO, Snowflake plans to raise €3.24 billion by valuing the shares between €75 and €85 each. The investment and blessing from Warren Buffett will likely help lift the company's stock price.
Snowflake IPO
The fact that Warren Buffett is considering investing in Snowflake is quite surprising, since he rarely invests in the enterprise technology market. The last time he did it was in November 2011, when Berkshire Hathaway bought a 5,4% stake in IBM for more than €10bn. Unfortunately for Buffett, this investment didn't pay off, and he ended up selling his IBM stake in 2018 to make a much bigger investment in Apple. According to IPO documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Snowflake aims to pioneer an ecosystem where customers and partners "can break down data silos and harness the value of rapidly growing data sets in a secure, governed, and compliant manner." Essentially, the company wants to help companies get the most out of the data they already store in data lakes and warehouses. Despite Snowflake's ambitious plans to Going forward, the company is still operating at a loss, and this year alone its net loss through the end of July was $171,3 million, while last year, the company had a net loss of €348,5 million. Despite those losses, sales are rising and Snowflake's sales reached €242 million in the first half of this year, which is almost more than the €265 million in sales it generated last year.Snowflake's IPO is scheduled by the end of September or through October and we'll just have to wait and see if Buffett's investment in the cloud computing company pays off. Via PYMNTS