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Investing.com – GoDaddy stock (NYSE:GDDY) rose 4.3% in Monday’s pre-market trading after The Wall Street Journal reported that hedge fund Starboard Value controls a roughly 6.5% stake in the domain registrar and plans to push the company to boost its performance.
At GoDaddy’s Thursday closing price of $76, the activist investor’s stake would be worth over $810 million.
The website of the New York-based fund says it “seeks to invest in deeply undervalued companies and actively engages with management teams and boards of directors to identify and execute on opportunities to unlock value for the benefit of all shareholders”.
GoDaddy shares have been a laggard in a record year for the equity market, falling more than 10% at a time when the Nasdaq Composite NASDAQ Composite has returned more than 22%.
The shares got a little bump early November when the company reported an over 14% jump in third-quarter revenue to $964 million and forecast full-year revenue of around $3.8 billion, banking on the continued momentum in its core business of domains registry and demand for its e-commerce tools. It then slid on reports of a data breach.
Starboard is run by Jeffrey Smith, who prior to founding the fund, was a partner managing director of Ramius, a subsidiary of the Cowen Group.
