Groupon had already lost 80% of its value before yesterday's CEO change
Groupon's stock dropped about 30% this morning after the company announced in its earnings release yesterday that it was changing CEOs. Cofounder Eric Lefkofsky will move to the chairman role, and ex-Amazon ad chief and current Groupon COO Eric Williams will take over as CEO.
But most investors had given up on Groupon long before this latest switch. As this chart from Statista shows, Groupon shares were already down about 80% from their IPO price before today's drop, despite a brief rally when original CEO Andrew Mason quit and was replaced by Lefkofsky in Feb. 2013. Today's decline extends that decline to 86%.
What went wrong? The company counted a lot of skeptics stemming all the way back to some unusual accounting in its initial IPO filing, but the big picture is that daily deals turned out to be a flash in the pan: Most businesses didn't get enough long-term customers from them to keep participating, and a lot of consumers burned out on the endless email offers in their inboxes as well.
