NEW YORK — The largest initial public offering of the year fell short of expectations, and the proposed second-largest was postponed, in a sign that IPOs are struggling while investors worry about the health of the global markets.
Late Wednesday, payment technology company First Data, which moved its headquarters from Greenwood Village to Atlanta in 2009, said its IPO priced at $2.56 billion. The offering was by far the largest of the 2015, but First Data had expected to raise hundreds of millions more.
Meanwhile Albertsons Cos., the second-largest supermarket operator in the U.S., said it would delay its own offering because of the volatile state of the markets.
Albertsons had projected it would raise as much as $1.7 billion by going public.
Earlier this year companies were going public at the fastest pace in years, but that changed over the past few months as Wall Street worried more and more about the slowing economy in China, the second-largest economy in the world.
