Facebooks IPO: One of world's largest

NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook found more than enough friends.

The world's definitive online social network said Thursday that it raised $16 billion for itself and its early investors in an initial public stock offering that values Facebook at $104 billion. That's more than Amazon.com and other well-known companies such as Kraft, Walt Disney and McDonald's.

It's a big windfall for a company that began eight years ago with no way to make money.

Electronic screens inside the Nasdaq stock market announce the listing of Facebook shares before the start of trading, Friday, May 18, 2012 in New York. The world's definitive online social network raised $16 billion in an initial public offering that values the company at $104 billion. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

Facebook priced its IPO at $38 per share on Thursday, at the top of expectations. Now, regular investors will have a chance to buy stock in Facebook for the first time. The stock will begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market sometime Friday morning. The ticker symbol will be FB.

Facebook's offering is the culmination of a year's worth of Internet IPOs that began last May with LinkedIn Corp. Since then, a steady stream of startups focused on the social side of the Web has gone public, with varying degrees of success. It all led up to Facebook, the company that's come to define social networking by getting 900 million people around the world to share everything from photos of their pets to their deepest thoughts.

It has done so while managing to become one of the few profitable Internet companies to go public recently. It had net income of $205 million in the first three months of 2012, on revenue of $1.06 billion. In all of 2011, it earned $1 billion, up from $606 million a year earlier. That's a far cry from 2007, when it posted a net loss of $138 million and revenue of $153 million.

"They could have gone public in 2009 at a much lower price," said Nick Einhorn, research analyst at IPO investment advisory firm Renaissance Capital. "They waited as long as they could to go public, so it makes sense that it's a very large offering."

Facebook Inc.'s valuation is the third-highest in an IPO, according to Dealogic, a provider of financial data. Only two Chinese banks, Agricultural Bank of China in 2010 and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China in 2006, have been worth more. They were worth $133 billion and $132 billion, respectively. By another measure —the amount raised— Facebook ranks third among U.S. IPOs. The largest was Visa, which raised $17.9 billion in 2008. No. 2 was Enel, a power company, and No. 4 was General Motors, according to Renaissance Capital.

The $38 share price is the price at which the investment banks arranging the offering will sell the stock to their clients. In an IPO, the banks buy the stock first from the company and the early investors and then sell to the public. If extra shares reserved to cover additional demand are sold as part of the transaction, Facebook and its early investors stand to reap as much as $18.4 billion.

For a company that was born in a Harvard dormitory and went on to reimagine online communication, the stock sale means more money to build on the features and services it offers users. It means an infusion of money to hire the best engineers to work at its sprawling Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, or in New York City, where it opened an engineering office last year.

And it means early investors, who took a chance seeding the young social network with start-up funds six, seven and eight years ago, can reap big rewards. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who sits on Facebook's board of directors, invested $500,000 in the company in 2004. He's selling nearly 17 million of his shares in the IPO, which means he'll get some $640 million. He will hold on to about 28 million shares, worth $1.06 billion.

The offering values Facebook, whose 2011 revenue was $3.7 billion, at as much as $104 billion. The sky-high valuation has its skeptics, who worry about signs of a slowdown and Facebook's ability to grow in the mobile space when it was created with desktop computers in mind. Rival Google Inc., whose revenue stood at $38 billion last year, has a market capitalization of $207 billion.

"There seems to be somewhat of a hype around the stock offering," says Gartner analyst Brian Blau.

That may be an understatement.

Facebook's IPO dominated media coverage in the weeks and days leading up to the event. CEO Mark Zuckerberg's hoodie made headlines when he wore it to a meeting with investors as did General Motors' decision this week to stop advertising on the site —and rival Ford's affirmation that its Facebook ads have been effective.

There are more than a few reasons for the exuberance. First, there's Facebook's sheer size and high profile. The company grew from a college-only social network to an Internet phenomenon embraced by legions of people, from teenagers to grandmothers to pro-democracy activists in the Middle East.

Secondly, it's personal.

"It's probably one of the first times there has been an IPO where everyone sort of has a stake in the outcome," Blau says. While most Facebook users won't see a penny from the offering, they are all intimately familiar with the company.

And then there's Zuckerberg, who turned 28 on Monday. He has emerged as the latest in a lineage of Silicon Valley prodigies who are alternately hailed for pushing the world in new directions and reviled for overstepping their bounds. He counted the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs among his mentors, and he became one of the world's youngest billionaires — at least on paper — well before Facebook went public. A dramatized and less-than-flattering version of Facebook's founding was the subject of a Hollywood movie that won three Academy Awards last year, propelling Zuckerberg even further into the public spotlight.

Though Zuckerberg is selling about 30 million shares, he will remain Facebook's largest shareholder. Even after the IPO, he will own 503.6 million shares, or 32 percent of Facebook's total shares. At the $38 share price, his stake in the company is worth $19.1 billion. Zuckerberg will control the company with 56 percent of its voting stock as a result of agreements he has with other shareholders who promise to vote his way.

The set-up helps to ensure that he and other executives keep control as the demands of Wall Street for short-term returns exert new pressures on the company.

True to form, Zuckerberg and Facebook's engineers are ringing in the IPO on their own terms. The company is holding an overnight "hackathon" Thursday, where engineers stay up writing programming code to come up with new features for the site. On Friday morning, Zuckerberg will ring the Nasdaq opening bell from Facebook's headquarters a continent away.

Source: The Associated Press

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Facebook IPO: Stock jumps in public debut

NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook is updating its status to "public company" as its stock jumps in its debut on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

The stock rose to $42.05 on Friday morning. CEO Mark Zuckerberg smiled as rang the opening bell from Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Surrounded by cheering Facebook employees and wearing his signature hoodie, the 28-year-old pushed the button that signals the opening of the stock market in New York.

On Thursday, Facebook and the investment bankers arranging the IPO settled on a price of $38 per share. The company and its early investors raised $16 billion in the offering, which valued Facebook at $104 billion. That makes Facebook the most valuable U.S. company to ever go public.

Now, the stock market will assign a dollar value to Facebook that will rise and fall with investor whims. It will be subject to broad economic forces as well as how much profit it earns from one quarter to the next. But Facebook is one of the rare companies whose IPO transcends Wall Street's money lust to become a cultural touchstone for the way technology is reshaping our lives. Since its start as a scrappy network for college students, Facebook has come to define social networking by getting 900 million people around the world to share everything from photos of their pets to their deepest thoughts.

It has done so while managing to become one of the few profitable Internet companies to go public recently. It had net income of $205 million in the first three months of 2012, on revenue of $1.06 billion. In all of 2011, it earned $1 billion, up from $606 million a year earlier. That's a far cry from 2007, when it posted a net loss of $138 million and revenue of $153 million. The company makes most of its money from advertising. It also takes a cut from the money people spend on virtual items in Facebook games such as "FarmVille."

Facebook's public debut marks a new milestone in the history of the Internet — and the people who use it. In 1995, Netscape Communications' IPO gave people their first chance to invest in a company whose graphical Web browser made the Internet more engaging and easier to navigate. Its hotly anticipated IPO lit the fuse that ignited the dot-com boom and culminated five years later in a devastating bust that obliterated the notion that the Internet had somehow hatched a new economy where making money no longer matter.

It took Google Inc.'s IPO in 2004 to prove just how profitable a well-run Internet company with a disruptive idea can be. In the process, the Internet search leader is forcing other industries to adapt to a new order where people have come to expect to be able to find just about anything they want by entering a few words into a box on any device with an Internet connection.

Facebook's IPO underscores an Internet evolution that has made the understanding of connections among people as important as Google's massive index of Web links. Now that Facebook will be under greater pressure to sell more advertising to bring in more revenue, this IPO also cast a brighter light on how just how much revealing information that people have been sharing the past few years without fully understanding the implications.

Facebook's IPO almost certainly will enrich other up-and-coming entrepreneurs as Zuckerberg uses the company's trove of cash and stock to buy other startups in an effort to being in other talented engineers and promising technology. That's what has been doing for years. Since it went public in 2004, Google has spent $10.2 billion buying nearly 200 other companies. Those figures don't include Google's still-pending $12.5 billion acquisition of cellphone maker Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc., which is still awaiting regulatory approval in China.

Zuckerberg's biggest deal came so far when he agreed to buy Instagram, a maker of a popular mobile app for photos, for $1 billion. Because most of the deal is being paid for in stock, Instagram is already getting richer. Based on Facebook's IPO price of $38 per share, Instagram is in line to receive nearly $1.2 billion.

Though Zuckerberg rang the Nasdaq opening bell from California, people outside the stock market in Times Square snapped photos of a big blue Facebook sign that lit up the building. Some of them used their smart phones to checked in to the Nasdaq on Facebook. Frederick Nolde, who was visiting from Richmond, Va., said he bought 100 shares through the online brokerage eTrade.

He thinks the company is worth $100 billion. "I think Google is a good comparison and it's worth $200 to 300 billion. The real question is how they do in mobile. if they can figure that out they'll do well."

Source: The Associated Press

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Facebook surrenders its privacy in IPO documents

The unveiling came late Wednesday when the company that depends on people to share their lives online filed its plans to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering of stock. It's a revelatory moment that prospective investors, curious competitors and nosy reporters have been awaiting for two years. During that time, Facebook established itself as a communications hub and emerged as a threat to the Internet's most powerful company, Google Inc.

This Dec. 13, 2011 file photo, shows of worker inside Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Facebook, the social network that changed "friend" from a noun to a verb, is expected to file as early as Wednesday to sell stock on the open market. Its debut is likely to be the most talked-about initial public offering since Google in 2004. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, file)

As with almost anything crafted by a bunch of lawyers and bankers, the 197-page prospectus that Facebook filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission is filled with boilerplate legalese and mind-numbing numbers.

But there were some juicy details in there, too.

Above all, the documents confirmed what everyone had been hearing: Facebook is very profitable and getting stronger. The company Mark Zuckerberg started with some friends in 2004 has seen its annual revenue soar from $777 million in 2009 to $3.7 billion last year. Facebook's earnings have grown at a similar rate too, ballooning from $122 million in 2009 to $668 million last year.

Facebook ended 2011 with $3.9 billion in cash. That's a relatively small amount compared to the nearly $45 billion that Google has in the bank.

Facebook's prosperity has been fueled by a steady expansion of its audience, making its website a more attractive marketing vehicle for ads, which account for most of the company's revenue. Facebook ended last year with 845 million users, up 39 percent from 608 million at the end of 2010. Those users share their interests and preferences prodigiously. Facebook recorded a daily average of 2.7 billion "likes" and comments during the final three months of last year.

Facebook has become so addictive that more than half its audience — 483 million users — log in every day.

Facebook's revenue total disappointed some people who pored through the documents. One reason: The company generates about $4.39 in revenue per user. "That is a surprisingly low number," said University of Notre Dame finance professor Tim Loughran, who studies IPOs. Google's annual revenue of nearly $38 billion works out to more than $30 per user of its services.

"Facebook needs to find more ways to get revenue from their users," Loughran said.

Facebook listed its most promising expansion opportunities as Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Russia and South Korea. The company, based in Menlo Park, Calif., eventually hopes to make its service available in China if it can navigate rules requiring online content to be censored if the Chinese government considers it to be objectionable or obscene.

The IPO filing gives some clue when Facebook is likely to surpass 1 billion users. If it can add users at roughly the same pace as last year, Facebook should surpass the 1 billion mark this summer.

As it is, Facebook already generates 44 percent of its revenue outside the U.S. The company is also developing other sources of revenue beyond online advertising faster than Google. Advertising accounted for 85 percent of Facebook's revenue last year. It made up 96 percent of Google's. Facebook's other revenue sources include the 30 percent cut of sales it takes from game makers and other external applications companies that sell things on its website.

The big question is whether Facebook's numbers are impressive enough to fetch the lofty IPO price. It's still too early in the process for Facebook to reveal how much it intends to ask for its shares, but Wednesday's filing provides some clues. Facebook valued its Class B common stock at $29.73 at the end of December, down slightly from appraisals of $30.07 in June and September. If this unfolds like most hot IPOs, Facebook will probably try to sell its shares at a premium. That could mean an IPO price in the $35 to $40 range. Investor demand, though, ultimately will dictate the pricing.

Facebook still hasn't listed how many outstanding shares it has, but the documents make it possible to make a rough estimate of the company's market value at the end of last year. Financial notes in the filing show Facebook calculated it had about 2.9 billion fully diluted shares at the end of December. That works out to a market value of about $86 billion, based on Facebook's $29.73-per-share self-appraisal.

At that price, the nearly 534 million shares that the 27-year-old Zuckerberg owns are worth about $16 billion. The filing indicates Zuckerberg will sell an unspecified number of shares in the IPO to cover a tax bill for exercising a stock option to buy 120 million shares. Zuckerberg has been collecting a $500,000 salary but that will fall to one dollar next year at his own request, according to the filing.

Other big winners in the IPO include: Facebook co-founder and old Zuckerberg friend, Dustin Moskovitz, who owns nearly 134 million shares; venture capital firm Accel Partners, which owns 201 million shares; Russian investor DST Global Ltd., which owns 131 million shares; and former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, who owns nearly 45 million shares.

Hundreds of other Facebook employees could become millionaires because they receive stock as part of their compensation. Facebook has about 3,200 employees now, nearly 2,000 more than it did two years ago.

Facebook also shared some of its biggest worries in the filing. Among other things, it cited Google's ability to use its dominance in Internet search to promote its Google Plus social network. Facebook also frets the possibility that regulators in Europe and the U.S. may impose tougher privacy rules that would make it more difficult for the company to stockpile information about its users.

Source: The Associated Press

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