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Facebook Reportedly Filing $5 Billion IPO Today
hypnosec writes "Today is the day when Facebook may be submitting all required paperwork to regulators for its $5 billion initial public offering. According to the source close to the deal, Facebook has selected Morgan Stanley along with four others — Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Barclay's Capital to handle this IPO. Morgan Stanley will be taking "lead left" role in this supposedly biggest IPO from Silicon Valley. According to International Financing Review, the preliminary target of $5 billion will be increased by many folds in coming few months as a response to the demands of investors. Sources close to this matter disclosed that this might turn out to be defining moment for current web investments. The deal might rise to $10 billion which eventually will make Facebook a social networking empire valued between $75 billion to $100 billion. In fact, $75 billion is definitely an undervaluation compared to previous expectations."
Time to tap into the kids' college fund. They can thank me later.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
And then watch carefuly the bubble explode...
Video of some good progressive thrash music
did you really select anyone?
Who's missing in that list of major investment banks?
Can't wait for the experts at StockChase to give their opinions. On the other hand, the IPO will be long gone before "experts" start talking about it.
Everybody put on your silly glasses and get drunk!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It's always comical to watch as business "insiders" plant information that exploit the gullability of the news media...the OP is basically providing free advertising for FB.
If you become a shareholder, will they use your name and address to spam you with adverts? ;)
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Based on that absurd valuation the average Facebook profile is worth $225.
I'm having a hard time figuring out how the investors expect to get their money out....
Facebook reportedly has, what, 10% of the world's population? What's its growth model from here?
And how will it make the sort of money needed to pay the investors?
I guess I'm sort of stumped at the "business opportunity" offered here. At a guess, Z and 499 other shareholders are going to come out of this with a wad of cash and everyone else will be holding a deflated balloon in a few years....
Reads like a rogue's gallery of the financial sector.
If I recall, Google was almost $100 a share when it IPO'ed and I thought that was way too much. So I did not buy, because I couldn't figure out how they were going to sustain that.
Well, I was quite wrong because Google went up to $200 then $300, then $400 and has been at something around $500 a share for the last 6 or 7 years. Crazy.
So, I don't know what to think about Facecrook. On one hand, I find the company utterly despicable. On the other hand, companies that are utterly despicable tend to go up in value -- a lot.
They are going to be the top dog in social media for at least the next 5 years, which is enough time to buy some shares, watch them go up in value, and then sell in about 3 or 4 years with no regrets if it goes up further.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I can't help but feel there's some irrational exuberance at work here. Exactly why is Facebook worth $75 or $100 Billion? Do they have a revenue stream like Google has?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
At a valuation of $75B to $100B, how much can we expect Facebook's share price to grow? Apple's valuation is now at $400B to $500B, so maybe 5 to 10 times at most while there is a considerable risk for not much growth at all. The share price of Amazon and Apple grew over 100 times since their IPO but this can't happen with Facebook because their IPO is coming fairly late. So, while the IPO is a great day for early investors, it's not worth it for average investors.
At the beginning was at.
I think it is interesting. What is the money going to be used for?
I have no clue. Did read an interesting blurb about Facebook wanting to cut out the middle men from their advtertising. Other than that, what do they need? Maybe a cleaner web page? That's not billions though.
The deal isn't any worst than buying Apple or Amazon stock right now. The growth potential is more modest, but it is still has higher potential of returns than investing in bonds.
If you want to make 100 times the amount you invest in, you have to look for small companies that no one knows about that have the potential to make it big.
who wants to bet that at the first stock holder meeting someone comes up and wants an explanation as to why there is no DIS-like button.
I hope they have a huge successful IPO.
I hope the share price takes off like a rocket.
I hope the Koch brothers and every other Gordon Gekko pumps their "hard-earned money" into the stock.
And then I hope that it tanks harder than MySpace in the hands of Rupert Murdoch.
More like the other way around. If they're IPOing this late they should have a solid balance sheet already. that makes it good for everyday investors and bad for high risk, high return ones. For every facebook that should have spent the last 8 years getting its business plan in order along with customers and so on there are 100 never heard ofs that took VC, and imploded. Facebook *should*, even if their balance sheet isn't great, have a plan on how to convert that IPO money into revenue, which is what people would be investing on. And if you can't figure out how facebook is going to collect 50 billion dollars a year in revenue, you should be very skeptical of valuing them at 100 billion dollars (which is just less than half the size of IBM or HP).
Everyday investors want to own banks and GE. Boring companies that pay boring dividends and have boring stock price growth. People who have money to lose want to invest in apples and amazons. Because how close did apple shareholders come to having nothing? Right. How many not quite amazons have disappeared into oblivion?
Arguably apple, with their 100 billion dollars cash on hand is a better 'everyday' investor bet than facebook, since Apple can pay out 20-25% of its shareholder value in a dividend tomorrow if it wants to. Facebook could get crushed under the weight of privacy rules all around the world or god knows what, and they have nothing of value to cough up to shareholders if they start faltering.
I'm going to look around right now for people to screw and things to steal.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The deal isn't any worst than buying Apple or Amazon stock right now.
That's right. But while Amazon and Apple probably are not going to grow 5 times either, they have a proven business model and they are unlikely to lose more than 50% in value. The same cannot be said about Facebook that depends for revenue heavily on a few partners. Therefore the risk/reward ratio should be much better for Facebook (to get me interested).
At the beginning was at.
All I can do is click like. I think all these neat technologies train us as much as we use them.
Anybody notice all the banks involved with the IPO?
Facebook seems a perfect match for them.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Assuming Facebook does not need the money to expand, the money raised will go to 1.cCash to Facebook for a rainy day, future acquisitions, etc. and 2. The current owners (cash out).
I am assuming that Facebook is going public not because it wants to, but because it has to. Once a company has more than 25 owners / partners it gets tricky. Owners are leaving and want to cash out, new employees want to buy in and have an actually ownership stake in what they are doing, etc.
I am going to assume this is going to be very much like the Google IPO. They had more than 250 owners so they had to do most of the paperwork / accounting that goes with a public company. They had a lot of people who wanted to cash out. Etc.
Can't wait to see how much the stock drops when they force timeline on everyone and users start deactivating (because you know you can never actually delete your information) en masse in protest as Facebook marches towards becoming the turd that is MySpace 3.0
There goes all of your oh-so-valued privacy at Facebook, now that they've got stockholders to answer to.
Check your premises.
The other 70%, you assclown.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They also have a physical goods sector of their business....Amazon has an entire webstore, Apple sells more through hardware than software...
Not sure what facebook has to offer that can actually achieve any more growth than what we've seen.
It will be interesting to see audited numbers from Facebook. Look for deferred expenses, future revenue accrued in the present, and expenses being capitalized.
The classic is that AOL capitalized their free AOL disks, rather than treating them as a marketing expense in the current year. When the SEC caught them on that, they had to restate several years of financials, and it turned out they became profitable six years after they said they did.
Groupon had similar problems with accounting for marketing expenses. This is a classic issue (or scam) with dot-coms which threw money at getting market share.
Now you have to deal with quarterly Sarbanes-Oxley controls.
Advice: on VPS providers
Really that's the question you need to ask yourself. Then ask if the company really is worth what they say it is worth, or if they are just looking for chumps to hold the empty bag as they make off with the cash.
Deleted
Facebook has a powerful business model too. It is able to deliver targeted advertising better than Google and has strong barriers of entry to prevent competitors from getting into the market.
But all this talk on if it is a good value is meaningless if we don't know how profitable Facebook is now and its future plans for growth compared to the price of the stock.
I don't use Facebook and I feel fine.
All cratered below IPO price
It's different this time! This time it's Facebook!
Deleted
what's more interesting is that the IPO might be auction-based, which means that facebook will net more of the raised proceeds than they might through a traditional IPO. investment banks typically make 7%-ish fees on IPOs for taking risk (they have a responsibility to make sure the share price rises and can lose money to prop it up), prepping the company for the roadshow, providing the syndication of institutional investors who pledge to buy initial shares (spreading the risk), and doing all the paperwork (like the prospectus, creating some legal/regulatory risk). with an auction, those fees would be reduced substantially (which is a good thing, from both a free-market and a social fairness perspective) since they wouldn't be providing the syndication or taking as much of the risk.
but they are forced to use Timeline.
Thank you. I'll be here all week. Tip your waitress. Try the veal.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Us. They are selling us. And they will grow revenue by removing more and more of our privacy.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Apple has a relatively low P/E right now.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
you know what's cool? 5 billion dollars
Re-read the article, but replace all instances of "Facebook" with "MySpace." This is exactly the opportunity I was looking for! Now it's time for me to move all the money I made from MySpace into the big next thing, Facebook. I'm so glad this is happening, I was starting to think MySpace couldn't go any higher.
Lots of pessimists here when it comes to Facebook. Can't say I'm not among them, but if people truly believe Facebook is going to crater, then short the hell out of it and make a profit.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Because dumb people *believe* FB to be worth something. It's not. Same as glass beads.
But I like it.
Why? Well, because it means when the whole delusion comes crashing down, it will hurt Facebook as well as those dumbasses. Two birds with one stone.
And believe me, it will come crashing down. As soon as e.g. MS buys it. Or Google wants to really destroy it. Or Apple sees that it uses "letters". The same concept they use to display tex.... ...
OH GOD, this world is SO fucked up!
The deal isn't any worst than buying Apple or Amazon stock right now. The growth potential is more modest, but it is still has higher potential of returns than investing in bonds.
Wrong.
The deal is, currently, a _lot_ worse than buying Apple. Apple sells for a P/E of 12.99, meaning that in 13 years, they will earn as much in profit as the current price they're valued at (that's the simple explanation, without accounting for their sizable amount of cash for which you pay when you buy a share), _without flat profits_, ie, no growth. Facebook sells, if the rumors of 150M$ net profit are true and the valuation of 75-100B$ are true, at a P/E of what, 500? The _only_ reason someone would remotely consider paying that price for its stock is expectations of massive growth.
From the prospectus, page 34
"The principal purposes of our initial public offering are to create a public market for our Class A common stock and thereby enable future access to the public equity markets by us and our employees, obtain additional capital, and facilitate an orderly distribution of shares for the selling stockholders"
Companies that want to buy other companies want to be public. Public companies can either offer cash or publicly traded stock. Publicly traded stock is better than private stock. The investors of the bought out company can either stay with the new merged company or sell their stock (cut and run).
Companies that want to be bought don’t want to be public.
First, they lose some control of the selling process. They have to sell to the highest (generally cash) bidder. Insiders generally have a harder time cutting special deals in regards to the minority shareholders.
Second, public companies have to disclose a lot more information, some of it audited. Negotiations can be similar to poker. Why show more cards then you have to? Just ask the Winklevoss twins.
No he gets it. Remember AoL? They were the platform of choice to do everything in the 90's, and look how long they lasted as a dominant market force once everybody got tired of their flash and glitz and move on.
I don't give them more than ten years before they are are just another washed up tech company.
Someone mod this racist piece of shit to infinity.
But yes, Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of Facebook are a bunch of cunts. It has nothing to do with their race or religion or anything. Cunts are cunts, and they run the world. Stop spreading bullshit like antisemitism and go do something about it.
It's the things your trusting friends put on Facebook about you that should be concerning.
consider: Face recognition technology goes from 75% accurate to 98% accurate with a social network graph involved (yes, I'm guessing).
So yes, Facebook magically sucks your personal data.. but not necessarily from _your_ brain.
and what about partnering companies.. do you use airmiles?
I find it amusing that the day Facebook issued their IPO is the same day I got my articles of incorporation back from ISC.
Coincidence?
Yeah, pretty much guaranteed there is no correlation. :D
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
guys, until you read 'running money' by andy kessler, you have no idea what a Tech IPO is, why it exists, and who benefits from it.
hint: it's not geeks, it's not investors, and it's not tech.
jesus christ, this is quite possibly the dumbest, most racist pile of shit i have seen on slashdot in a long time. fucktards like you are what keeps the financial industry from actually being reformed - people don't want to be lumped along with hitler (who shared your sentiments, word for word)
Ron Paul? Is that you?
Used all 4 of my mod points in this thread, lol. Happy?
I missed out on the Redhat IPO, so I pitched all of my IRA (but not the 403(b) or 401(k)) into the Google IPO at $80. I've never taken profits to re-diversify, but it's been working out damn well. My continued thanks to Brin and Page for leaving money on the table and allowing retail investors to get a taste.
The Facebook IPO looks to be old school, with the 0.1% getting the lion's share of the initial (and perhaps sole) profits from any run up in market price. I have little control over what my index funds admins elect to do, but I don't see any point in retail investors buying until after the feeding frenzy is over and we've got a few months to see where their P/E settles in.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Am I the only guy that remembers the tech bubble bursting and taking all the dotcoms and the dumb money with it?
The funniest part of their filing is the motto at the very top of their connected globe:
"To make the world more open and connected"
Let's pretend we stand for the exact opposite of what we do and people will bite.
Slashdot is a news aggregator with threaded discussion. I only sign in so I don't start at Score: 0
I care about the ideas expressed here, and not even a little bit about the pseudonyms and personalities behind those ideas.
On the continuum between anonymous image boards -> Web forums -> social network site, it is far closer to the anonymous image board.
besides the founders cashing in ofc
What would be the reason for Facebook to go public?
Do they need a new influx of cash to expand their business?
Do they want the oversight of shareholders if they make 0.5% less profit then the year before instead of going up by 5%?
The way I see it they currently have a profitable privately owned business. Since they don't need to build a new manufacturing plant to expand and thus not need any major cash influx I see no reason to go public except to cash out on their hard work and effort but in that case I would opt to just sell the company and be done with it instead of doing the same thing with a bigger bank account and oversight.
I'm surprised nobody commented on that so far: 85% of the income of Facebook comes from advertising. I use Facebook a lot, and I never see any ads. Facebook is making $0 off me, and I'm not that special - for anyone who uses Firefox or Chrome (50% of internet users, 99% of slashdotters), ad-block is the first add-on you set up. Once everyone figures it out, how the hell are they going to make money off ads? Google has a similar problem, but their sponsored links and many other ventures make it easier for them to sneak their ads. Perhaps this is the reason why Google makes $30 per user, while Facebook makes only $4-5.