By
Tolu Ajiboye
June 7th, 2023
With the coronavirus pushing more organizations and businesses to operate remotely via cloud services, GitLab anticipates adding on its numbers in the coming quarters.
GitLab Inc (NASDAQ: GTLB) stock continued with its volatility during Monday’s pre-market, after a magnificent Initial Public Offering last week. Notably, GTLB shares closed last week trading at $115.0, up 10.69% on Friday. The company had initially set its IPO price at $77, but the stock surged to trade above $103 the first day, October 14, 2021.
Having risen more than 34% on the first day and closing the week trading at $150 per share, GitLab saw its market capitalization surge to over $16 billion. Interestingly, the company has now scaled twice the value that Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) paid for GitHub back in 2018, $7.5 billion.
Besides hugely entering the public market, GitLab boasts of some of the largest companies in the world as notable users. The list of users includes Alibaba Group, IBM, Elon Musk-backed SpaceX, Nvidia, and GNOME. With its growing capitalization, GitLab is well poised to widen its market venture and compete stealthily with GitHub.
Notably, its largest rival GitHub has a total of 65+ million developers and over 3 million organizations using its system. On the other hand, GitLab has an estimated 30 million users and more than 1 million active license users worldwide. Additionally, the platform has ventured into remote work and employs over 1,350 people in over 65 countries.
With the coronavirus pushing more organizations and businesses to operate remotely via cloud services, GitLab anticipates adding on its numbers in the coming quarters. Notably, the company sold 10,400,000 shares during its IPO.
GitLab (GTLB) and the Future Growth Prospects
Sytse “Sid” Sijbrandij, Gitlab Inc.’s Co-founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Board of Directors Chair has indicated that the company has more advantages over its competitors. “Our competitor GitHub has 270 employees. GitLab has 800 contributors,” he said, touting his company’s open-source bona fides. “That is why GitHub enterprise has been playing catch-up to our feature set.”
While Microsoft seems to use GitHub for Azure’s global adoption, GitLab is committed to providing the best services for developers around the world.
However, GitHub remains at a huge competitive angle as it is backed by a big tech company with a huge revenue stream. “As a cash-generating machine, Microsoft can easily afford to offer GitHub services at or below cost in an effort to gain market share and bring users into the Microsoft platform,” the firm wrote. “GitLab’s dependence on one revenue stream, subscriptions and licenses to its DevOps platform, is a major competitive disadvantage as it attempts to compete with profitable companies that have many other revenue streams to support loss-leaders.”