Shares in Deliveroo ROO, -1.90% slumped by as much as 30% as the U.K. food delivery company made its highly-anticipated stock market debut on the London Stock Exchange, dealing a blow to the city’s efforts to attract more technology listings post-Brexit.
Read: Amazon-Backed Deliveroo Trims IPO Price Range Ahead of London Debut, Citing ‘Volatile’ Market Conditions Hundreds of Deliveroo riders are planning a protest next week to lobby for better pay and conditions.“It’s certainly a disappointing outcome for an IPO that initially generated a lot of enthusiasm,” wrote Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets U.K., in a research note on Wednesday. “However recent weakness in the share price of a number of its peers in the U.S., like DoorDash, appears to have taken some of the shine off the sector,” he added.
Dual-class structures are more common in the U.S., where they are used by companies including tech giants Google parent Alphabet GOOGL, +3.26% and Facebook FB, +1.40%, but U.K. investors are wary of them because they give executives outsize influence on shareholder votes relative to their stake sizes.