Wish went from a $24 IPO to a $173M fire sale in three years

Wish was a mobile shopping app from ContextLogic, a San Francisco company founded in 2010. It sold ultra-cheap goods, mostly shipped from manufacturers in China, through a gamified app and a flood of advertising on Facebook, Google and Instagram. By the time it went public it reported more than 100 million monthly active users.

The company priced its IPO at $24 a share in December 2020. Its filings showed the engine underneath: revenue had grown to more than $2.5 billion, but it was spending over $1 billion a year on marketing to buy customers, and it was still losing money — more than $300 million in 2020 alone.

The customers the ads bought did not stay. Average order values were tiny, shipping took weeks, quality and refunds were chronic, and the cost of acquiring a customer was never recovered on later purchases. Revenue fell sharply after 2020 as the advertising stopped paying, and the shares collapsed from $24 to well under $1.

In February 2024 ContextLogic agreed to sell substantially all of Wish to the Asian e-commerce group Qoo10 for $173 million in cash — $6.50 a share. ContextLogic kept $2.7 billion of net operating loss carryforwards, the tax record of everything the company had lost.