Uber's main competitor was valued at $24.7 billion. This is higher than all expectations

Taxi booking service Lyft today announced that it has completed its IPO at the high end of its range , at $72 per share. This is a strong opening for a year of big tech IPOs, but investors will be watching closely to see where Lyft's price moves. A big decline would be very bad news for the next big competitor, Uber, to be listed.

More. Lyft raised its IPO share price to $72 per share. The entire company is thus valued at $25 billion (with options and greenshoe), the IPO amounted to approximately $2.34 billion.

• Trading under the ticker symbol LYFT on Nasdaq will open on Friday.
• The IPO price is well above the range inscribed in the first application ($62-68 per share), thanks to strong investor demand.
• The company's net loss for 2018 increased by a third, to $911 million, however, revenue doubled to $2.16 billion.
• A 10-point revenue valuation means investors are betting on Lyft's exponential growth. So far, the company has lived up to expectations: in 2016, it earned only $343 million.
• This is the first IPO of a taxi service.
• This is the largest IPO in nearly five years since the Alibaba Group entered the market in 2014.

Read also Uber and Lyft pre-IPO bonuses in cash or shares of their drivers

Context. Lyft's IPO kicks off a series of big 2019 tech IPOs and will be used to evaluate all subsequent IPOs. Uber is next in line, aiming for a $120 billion valuation, followed by Airbnb, messaging app Slack, Pinterest, WeWork , and even the semi-secret analytics firm Palantir, with less certainty.

Taxi booking service Lyft operates in the US and Canada. It has almost 40% of the American taxi order market (1.9 million drivers, 31 million orders in 2018), including from Uber. Like its main competitor, Lyft creates an unmanned taxi, but, unlike it, not independently, but in a consortium with Magna and Aptiv.