Jaguar Animal Health trims IPO target number by 26%

Jaguar Animal Health, maker of gastrointestinal drugs for animals, is trimming its IPO target by 26% and hoping to raise as much as $51.75 million instead of the $70 million it was looking for when originally filing to go public back in August.

The news came in an amended SEC filing by the San Francisco-based company earlier this week. Jaguar, whose largest shareholders are Napo Pharmaceuticals and BioVeda China Fund, is now planning to sell 5 million shares at between $7 and $9 per share, according to the regulatory filing. Jaguar will trade under the symbol JAGX.

When first announced in late summer, Jaguar and other animal health companies like Brazil's veterinary product manufacturer Ouro Fino Saúde Animal Participações S.A. were seen by analysts as part of a thawing of what had been a frozen IPO market in the industry. That freeze seemed to first warm following Pfizer's ($PFE) spinoff of Zoetis ($ZTS) last year. The Zoetis offering raised about $2.2 billion and had industry insiders saying pent-up demand for public offerings was about to be unleashed.

Then last April, Phibro Animal Health ($PAHC)--maker of animal health and nutrition products--raised $176.5 million in its public offering.

Since then, the financial markets have been spotty but mostly up in animal health. Parnell Pharmaceuticals ($PARN), an Australian biotech with its U.S. headquarters based in Kansas, lost more than half its value since going public in June; Aratana Therapeutics ($PETX) gained 74% since June 2013; and Kindred Biosciences ($KIN) rose 29% since December 2013.

Meanwhile, New Jersey-based pet food maker Freshpet ($FRPT)--also slotted to go public next week--said on Monday in a regulatory filing it was raising its IPO target by more than 67% to $167.7 million.

Still, if you look at what has been happening to tech industry IPOs in the past month and a half, there might be some caution returning to a public venue in the wake of volatile fluctuations in the stock market.

Bloomberg reported in mid-October that Good Technology, a California-based mobile-security startup, was postponing its public offering until next year because of worsening market conditions. They had hoped to raise $100 million.

At the time, the news agency said 5 technology companies went public, raising $834 million, since Alibaba's wildly successful launch in September. Yet, the performance of those 5 companies returned an average of 9% to investors since their debuts, versus an average 24% boost they experienced on their first day of trading.

- see Jaguar's SEC filing
- read Silicon Valley BJ's take