Article 5YMK8 Mark Shuttleworth: Expect Canonical to Go Public in 2023

Mark Shuttleworth: Expect Canonical to Go Public in 2023

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upstart writes:

The Founder and CEO of Canonical, the company behind the popular Linux Distribution Ubuntu, indicated on Thursday that the company will probably have its IPO sometime in 2023:

According to Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical, the commercial entity behind Ubuntu, is ready to start planning for its initial public offering, an event that can be expected to happen sometime next year.

[...] In addition to an IPO that might be in the works, it appears that the company is at least approaching profitability. According to Frederic Lardinois at TechCrunch, Shuttleworth said on Thursday during a press briefing focused on last week's release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, that Canonical's revenues last year were $175 million, and that the biggest issue the company is facing is that it can't meet customer demand, mainly due to a shortage of tech talent.

[...] According to Lardinois, Shuttleworth also made it clear that any IPO would not be driven by any need to raise funds to meet obligations.

It's been obvious to folks watching Canonical that for some time the company's focus hasn't been on Ubuntu's desktop operating system but on its server OS. This shift began in earnest in 2017, which is when it decided that Ubuntu Touch, the mobile OS it'd been developing, was a no starter and announced its demise as a Canonical project, along with Unity, its homegrown desktop environment which was replaced with Gnome.

By that time, Ubuntu Server was becoming popular and had already become the most used Linux distribution on Amazon Web Services. Since then, not only has the company found success monetizing its server business through security subscriptions and such, but has become a major player in the Kubernetes- and container-focused cloud native arena.

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