Helped By Coronavirus Crisis, Wix Becomes Israel’s Second-highest Valued Company

TEL AVIV (JTA) — The coronavirus crisis has helped make Wix, the popular website creator platform, the second-highest valued Israeli company.

Its share price has increased by 260 percent since March, Haaretz reported Monday, trading as high as about $319 on the Nasdaq exchange last week before dropping to about 283 on Monday morning.

Wix allows users to easily create websites with templates and drag and drop tools in a way similar to competitors such as WordPress and Squarespace.

“We’ve made a leap from being a consumer product for a particular group to a necessity for many more people,” said Nir Zohar, the company’s president and chief operating officer. “It’s the way many people today are making a living, by selling online.”

Wix’s market cap was around $4 billion in 2018 — it is now close to $16 billion, according to Haaretz. That puts the nearly 15-year-old company close behind the cybersecurity firm Check Point Software Technologies, which at $17.3 billion is Israel’s most valuable business.

Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami and Giora Kaplan founded Wix in Tel Aviv in 2006.