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Uber Technologies Inc.’s day of reckoning finally arrived, and the reckoning doesn’t look so great.

The ride-hailing unicorn late Thursday set a price of $45 per share for its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange Friday, raising a sweet $8.1 billion for the money-losing company.

But Uber’s shares opened trading Friday morning at only $42 a share. They recovered somewhat to about $44 in later trading, but by day’s end, they had fallen even further, 7.6%, to close at $41.60 a share.

It surely didn’t help that new tariffs the Trump administration imposed on Chinese goods sent the overall market down by as much as 1.6% in morning trading before it recovered to close up a little under a half-point. But no doubt investors are also wary of Uber’s prospects.

The $45 price was already at the lower end of the guidance of $44 to $50 per share Uber gave in April. That likely reflects the poor performance of rival ride-hailing firm Lyft Inc. since it went public March 28.

It also might have been a strategy for ensuring a first-day pop in the price. Although that could leave some money on the table, it also would have been seen as a show of confidence in a company’s prospects. That strategy, however, didn’t work this time.

Coming into its long-awaited IPO, Uber isn’t the largest company to go public, but it is the biggest U.S. tech initial offering since Facebook Inc., with a market valuation of $82.4 billion. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. holds the global crown, going public in 2014 at a valuation of $168 billion. Even Uber’s initial price meant a valuation well below the $120 billion mentioned for Uber last year and also below the $90 billion to $100 billion Uber itself cited when it first filed its IPO paperwork.

Although Uber is in something of a class of its own by virtue of its size — both its revenues and its losses, which totaled $1.1 billion in the first quarter of this year alone — the market’s tepid reception still could cast a shadow on offerings from other tech companies. Already a number of them, from Lyft to Pinterest Inc., have gone public this year, but there are others still waiting in the pipeline, and their underwriters and investors alike can’t be too happy with Uber’s performance.

Uber has continued to surprise recently with a range of last-minute deals. The company announced April 28 that it had taken on an investment of $500 million from PayPal Inc., while in March it acquired rival Middle Eastern ride-hailing firm Careem Networks FZ for $3.1 billion.

Just for good measure, Uber also managed to sell off a $1 billion stake in its autonomous vehicle division April 18. The lead investor in the partial spinoff of Uber’s self-driving car unit was Japanese telco giant SoftBank Corp. through its venture capital division SoftBank Vision. SoftBank, in fact is the largest single investor, holding an 18% stake in the firm, most of which was acquired through the acquisition of shares from now previous shareholders in 2017.

Uber is entering the market at a turbulent time. That’s partly because of the drop in the price of Lyft shares post-IPO, which has spawned an investor lawsuit.

Moreover, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq indexes have each declined for four days straight on fears of a possible trade war between the U.S. and China. Although that hasn’t directly affected Uber, particularly given that it sold its China business to Didi Chuxing Technology Co. in 2016, skittish markets make for uncertain IPOs.

That’s on top of doubts about Uber on account of its massive losses with no promise of profit in the near future, not to mention protests this week by drivers at both Uber and Lyft over what they consider low pay.

That said, many companies have gone public with big first-day pops, only to tank later. Others, such as Facebook, also came out poorly at first but turned into blockbuster companies. So truth be told, the first days and weeks don’t necessarily mean that much.

Still, as rocky as the first day of Uber trading looks, there may be more of them to come.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Pixabay