First High-School Education Stock Falls in Market Debut

First High-School Education Group stock closed below its initial public offering price in its first day of trading, ending Thursday down 13.1%. 

Shares of First High-School (ticker: FHS) opened at $9.50 and ended at $8.69. The stock never traded at or above its $10 offer price, making it a broken deal.

The dismal performance comes a day after Roblox (RBLX), the most anticipated IPO of the week, jumped 54% in its market debut. Roblox stock was up Thursday nearly 4% in late-morning trading. 

Coupang (CPNG) also began trading. The stock opened at $59.60 and ended at $49.25, up nearly 41%. The Korean e-commerce giant raised $4.6 billion after boosting the size of its IPO, which priced above its expected price range. Coupang had initially filed to sell 120 million shares at $27 to $30, which it increased to $32 to $34 earlier this week. It ended up selling 130 million shares at $35 each.

Earlier Thursday, First High-School Education Group raised a much smaller $75 million after selling 7,500,000 American Depositary Shares at $10 each, the midpoint of its $9.50-to-$10.50 price range. Each ADS represents three Class A ordinary shares. 

First High-School Education is one of the largest operators of private high schools in Western China. The company has developed a network of 19 schools, offering 14 high-school programs, seven middle-school programs and four tutorial-school programs. It had 25,857 students as of Sept. 30, including 17,230 high-school students and 8,637 middle-school students, a prospectus said. 

First High-School is profitable. The company reported income of 33.9 million Chinese yuan ($5 million) for the nine months ended Sept. 30, compared with a profit of 7.6 million Chinese yuan ($1.12 million) for the same time period in 2019. Total revenue rose 30% to 282.3 million Chinese yuan ($41.6 million) for the nine months ended Sept. 30. It had 2,413 full-time employees.