Affichage des articles dont le libellé est ipo. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est ipo. Afficher tous les articles
vendredi 11 mai 2012
Facebook Inches Into Craigslist Territory With ‘Highlighted Posts’
The feature — discovered by Stuff, a New Zealand blog (which is unaffiliated with the U.K. publication of the same name) — is being tested with a “small percentage of users” right now, a Facebook rep says. The fee for using Highlighted Posts, meanwhile, runs from zero to “a couple of bucks.”
When asked who would use the product, the rep gave the example of a small band plugging an upcoming gig or someone selling their car. The latter appears to be new ground for Facebook since the company hasn’t previously offered users the ability to amplify their status updates. If the program is successful, it could let Facebook enter the online classified market, a segment that the IAB pegged at $2.6 billion in 2011.
It’s unclear how the program — which is similar to new ad products aimed at corporate users — would work and if it would function along the lines of Reach Generator, a Facebook ad product that ensures that a high percentage of people in your network see your post.
The rep stressed that Highlighted Posts is one of many products the company is testing right now.
The introduction comes a week before Facebook’s expected IPO. Facebook filed an amended S-1 form on Wednesday highlighting the fact that its advertising growth hasn’t kept pace with its exploding user base.
11:59 0
vendredi 23 mars 2012
LinkedIn Chairman Sells Small Stake of Facebook Stock
Hoffman was part of the seed funding round in 2004, and has held on to the stock since then. An estimate of his stake is 0.5% of the company, and seeing as he’s holding on to the majority of his shares we can estimate his sale to be up to 0.24% of Facebook – a hefty amount. Reid is also the largest shareholder of LinkedIn (LNKD) with $1.9 billion of stock given its current price of $99 giving it a market capitalization of 9.8B.
Facebook’s IPO looks to be about $5B worth of stock, and at about 5% of the company, which gives them the $100B valuation. For more news about the IPO, check out AllFacebook.
16:48 0
dimanche 4 mars 2012
Yammer Raises $85 Million In Funding
The money will specifically be used to hire more sales and engineering staff members and also improve advertising. It wouldn’t be a stretch to see Yammer using the money to acquire other, smaller start-ups in the space as well.
After tripling sales growth in 2011 the company has acquired a net total of 4 million users of their social networking service. The software is best described as Facebook for your company. Every employee has a profile and wall, and users are able to exchange ideas and stalk each other just like on Facebook. The home news feed is extremely useful in Yammer, and you can see what your colleagues are up to at a glance.
Yammer’s not alone, though. The space is heating up, and public company and competitor Jive recently announced their revenues had surged by 53% over the last quarter.
08:45 0
mardi 14 février 2012
Twitter Investors, Including Employees, Can Only Sell 20% of Their Stock [REPORT]
In a move designed to forestall an IPO for as long as possible,Twitter has a rule barring any investor, including employees, from selling more than 20% of their stock, according to a report.
Twitter initiated the rule about a year ago, but it hadn’t been made public, according to CNNMoney. The guideline is somewhat controversial within the company and allegedly prompted Senior Technical Engineer Evan Weaver to resign last August.
According to the article, Weaver’s departure prompted an explanatory email to staffers from CEO Dick Costolo. The email outlined Twitter’s reason behind the policy: To keep to the SEC-dictated limit of under 500 investors. Beyond that number, Twitter would have to go public. “We don’t want to be public until we have very predictable quarterly earnings growth,” Costolo wrote in his August email, according to the article. “We’re not ready to be a public company for a couple years… There is one reasonable way to do this: Let everybody with vested common stock sell only some fraction of their shares,” Costolo added.
Twitter reps could not be reached for comment on the report.
Costolo’s stance on going public mirrors his other recent public statements. Like other social media firms, including, for a time, Facebook, Twitter appears to be holding off an IPO as a way of limiting outsider investors’ influence. That approach has hardly dimmed enthusiasm for the stock, though. Last March, Twitter’s valuationhit $7.7 billion on Sharespost, which trades shares on the secondary market.
Limiting shareholders means catering to deep-pocketed investors, including Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who sank $300 million into the company in December. Like Facebook, Twitter has also stopped giving out stock to employees instead offering them restricted stock units (RSUs), which can only be converted to actual shares after an IPO or a corporate buyout, according to the report.
Image courtesy of Flickr, eldh
15:52 0
vendredi 3 février 2012
Could Facebook’s Newly Wealthy Employees Help California’s Withering Economy?
“The closest analogue is the 2004 Google IPO,” he said. “Its benefit to the state’s general fund was in the neighborhood hundreds of millions– at least $400 million.”
Facebook, based in Menlo Park, Calif., afforded generous pre-IPO stock options to as many as 1,000 of its employees. They now stand to make a fortune when the stock goes public. One of the ways the state will make money is when employees cash out their shares and then have to pay taxes.
“If it’s as big as it’s advertised, it certainly has the potential to eclipse the Google IPO — but it won’t happen over night,” Palmer said. “While the potential revenue gain is certainly significant, it has to be viewed in the larger context of the legislature having to close a budget gap that we estimate to be $9.2 billion before the state’s new fiscal year begins on July 1st.”
There’s nothing currently built into the state budget, finalized in December, 2011, that reflects any increase in funds related to Facebook’s IPO. At the time, it was unknown when the company’s IPO would be announced. But the state will release a revised revenue forecast in May, which could reflect any Facebook IPO money affecting the state’s General Fund revenue for the coming fiscal year.
Jason Sisney, deputy legislative analyst for the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office which advises the California legislature on state budget issues, said that lawmakers are eager to know how Facebook will affect California’s economy.
Because tax records are private, no one will ever know the Facebook IPO’s precise impact on the state, but Sisney said his office must consider Facebook when they revisit the budget.
“Given the budgetary pressures they (legislators) face, they’re interested in not making more cuts than they have to,” he said. “This is more than a drop in the bucket, it’s a pretty noticeable chunk of money.”
But even the most optimistic estimates of Facebook’s revenue are not enough to cure the state’s mammoth budget woes.
“This is only going to be one relatively small piece of how California addresses its budgetary issues in the next few years,” Sisney added.
It also remains to be seen exactly how much California will benefit from Facebook and where the most revenue will come from — whether it’s from taxes on the IPO filing itself or on executives cashing out stock. When these various taxes are paid will determine which fiscal year California’s legislature can include Facebook in its budget.
Facebook employees with stock options won’t pay taxes until they sell their shares. Once Facebook employees sell their shares, the money will be taxed as personal income. The top marginal rate for personal income tax in California is 9.3%. Individuals whose adjusted gross income is more than $1 million pay an additional 1%, with that money going toward mental health programs under Proposition 63. In the 2011 tax year, about 1 percent of earners generated more than 40 percent of all the personal income tax in California.
“History suggests that a lot of investors will sell some of their stake and diversify their portfolios, to spend, to save, to give to charity and other purposes,” Sisney said.
Comparing Facebook with Google, Palmer said Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin sold most of their stock over an 18-24 month period.
Richard A. Walker is a professor at University of California, Berkeley, and an expert in economic geography and California. He said that as outside investors purchase Facebook stock, Zuckerberg and employees with stock options will become wealthier.
An influx of wealthy Facebook people buying property could also drive up housing prices in the San Francisco Bay Area. But he said that property buys won’t provide as much long-term help to the economy as purchases of things like cars, food, and hardware.
Walker also said that, while hundreds of newly-minted millionaires could boost the California economy somewhat, their newfound riches will also come with economic drawbacks. “On the other hand, these kinds of super-IPOs contribute to the class of very rich people and to the ongoing problem of class inequality in California, which is already very bad — one of the worst states in the U.S.,” Walker said. “While the tech boom today is a healthy contributor to the local economy, what the state needs more is ordinary jobs with decent pay, not just high-paid or very wealthy techies.”
05:41 0
jeudi 2 février 2012
Facebook : les indicateurs clés de l'IPO en une image
Facebook a mis fin au suspense en annonçant son introduction en Bourse
le 1er février. Passage en revue des chiffres
clés de de l'opération en une image.
Facebook a officialisé son introduction en Bourse le 1er février en déposant son dossier auprès de la la Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC).
L'opération sera la plus grosse IPO (Initial Public Offering) jamais réalisée par une société Internet avec une levée minimum de 5 milliards $. La cotation du titre, sur le New York Stock Exchange ou le Nasdaq, n'interviendra pas avant une période minimum légale de 91 jours sous le ticker-symbol FB.
Huit ans après sa création, cette IPO est l'occasion de découvrir le chiffre d'affaires réalisé par le réseau social : 3,7 milliards $ en 2011, en hausse de 88 % par rapport à l'année précédente, pour un résultat net de 1 milliard $.
La publicité représente 85 % de ses revenus et 15% sont générés par les prélévements de 30% sur les applications payantes tierces distribuées sur le site, essentiellement les jeux proposés par l'éditeur de social games Zynga, inventeur du célèbre Angry Birds, qui procure 12 % du chiffre d'affaires total de Facebook.
Parmi les autres informations dévoilées dans le document d'introduction, on trouve la part de capital détenue par le co-fondateur et CEO, Marc Zuckerberg. Avec 28,4%, il est le premier actionnaire de la société et s'est assuré, via un pacte d'actionnaires, le contrôle de près de 57% des droits de vote pour garder le contrôle sur la stratégie.
09:37 0
mercredi 1 février 2012
Facebook IPO: Top 10 Things to Do While You Wait
According to reports, most indicators point to $10 billion in stock and a valuation at over $100 billion — making it the largest in tech IPO in history.
While we’re all watching our social streams, waiting for the news to drop, the Mashable team has decided to share what we believe are the best ways to pass the time.
13:40 0
vendredi 27 janvier 2012
Can Regular Investors Buy a Piece of Facebook ?
Mashable is not a financial publication, and we’re not in the business of giving stock market tips. But we can break down the IPO process — and gauge the likelihood of a regular investor getting in on the ground floor.
Don’t Get Your Hopes Up
We’ll cut to the chase — unless you’re a close personal friend or relative of a Facebook executive, or you manage an enormous amount of capital, you have almost no chance of getting IPO pricing on a stock like Facebook.
Why? Well, as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) points out, “the underwriters and the company that issues the shares control the IPO process.” The SEC doesn’t regulate how these primary shares are allocated.
In Facebook’s case, the Wall Street Journal reports that Morgan Stanley will likely be the lead underwriter for the IPO, with Goldman Sachs also expected to play a large role.
These investment banks are going to target large customers and institutional investors. The goal is to move shares by the millions, not the hundreds or thousands.
Even if you have an account with Morgan Stanley or Goldman, you’re probably not going to get to make any purchases as an individual — not unless you are a big-time celebrity or business mogul. (Ashton Kutcher, it’s your lucky day.) In most cases, the underwriter will call you and let you know if you can get in on the action.
What Can Average Investors Do?
Aside from buying pre-IPO shares on something like SecondMarket — which, again, has some basic financial requirements that will exclude most individual investors — investors interested in a Facebook IPO have a few options:
- Buy into a mutual fund that invests in IPOs. There are a few of these funds in the market, such as the Global IPO Plus Aftermarket fund from Renaissance Capital. The returns on these funds tends to be flat, however — and with a stock like Facebook, it’s unlikely that this fund will get much of the action.
- Buy on the aftermarket. This is where it can get tricky. Putting in a market order the day a stock opens can be risky. In fact, many retail investors were burned during the dotcom era for moving too fast on IPO stocks that never again exceeded their order price. Placing a limit order or stop market order can help alleviate some of the risk, but it won’t guarantee a buyer a piece of the action.
- Watch from the sidelines. Sometimes it pays to take a step back and watch the market from afar before jumping in. An IPO Facebook could be the next Google — but there’s also a chance it could also be the next Yahoo. Wait and see.
14:29 0
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