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Facebook To Go Public On Friday, May 18
redletterdave writes "The IPO on everyone's minds for the past few years — and possibly the biggest one in history — is upon us: Facebook will finally make its Wall Street debut on Friday, May 18, 2012. Sources also say Facebook will begin its IPO roadshow on Monday, May 7, and will eventually list its shares on the Nasdaq (not NYSE) with the ticker symbol 'FB.' Facebook looks to raise anywhere from $5 billion to $10 billion during its roadshow to achieve a $100 billion valuation, which would make it one of the biggest IPOs of all-time."
Someone have to say it: Bubble
There.
This will open low, shoot high, then nosedive and stay low for a long time.
You can play in this sandbox, as long as you understand that all the sand belongs to someone else, and at bets you can get in, fill your bucket, dump it, and get back out before any one notices you are there.
Everybody recognizes this for what it is, a cashout for the major FB players.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
This IPO will basically put a concrete dollar price on what having the "private data" of 800+ million human beings in your fist is worth. Of course the idiots who run Wall Street will value this "precious resource" at Billions of Dollars. That's the only thing the internet means to them: A way to track people, get at their most private data, to then mine that data to devise new ways of selling goods and services to them. ----------- It isn't Facebook that's being valued here. Its "US". The IPO will put a dollar price on what the private data of X million FB users is worth.-------- Someday Facebook will face a serious downturn just like AOL and Yahoo!, and maybe disappear from the internet landscape altogether. That day can't come soon enough considering that the only thing FB trades in is other people's privacy.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
a $100 billion company should be making a truckload more than that.
google (current market cap $200billion) pulls in about $10billion in quarterly revenue...
judging by that facebook is at best a $20 billion company. about 1/10th the size of google.
yeah, it is a bit more complicated than that, but still facebook is worth nowhere near $100 billion. and really they don't have a whole lot of growth left, they have saturated their market pretty well.
Facebook is God's gift to marketing data. People willingly give their personal data to have their little ego sites.
Here's the kink: Most of that data is bullshit. And frankly, I love it. Here's an example:
This little old lady I know was told by her kids and friends (myself NOT included - I told her to NOT have a FB account!) to give bullshit data. She really wanted an account, so we insisted that she give enough for those assholes at FB to allow her to open an account. She had to give a cell number - it freaked the poor thing out.
You see, when she FIRST opened one, a neighbor down the street found out all this detail about her that she NEVER published on her FB page. HE then explained what a privacy violation FB is and how one can get all this info on someone with a FB account - GOD BLESS HIM! He SHOWED to her how FB can be and will be used for EVIL.l She saw the light - even though she needed an FB account to communicate with her family (so she says) - she put in bogus data.
Moral of the story, if you're a marketer and you're using FB for data mining pupsoses - AHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!
Fuck you!
I'd disagree about their growth potential. Certainly their user growth will slow down, but there are plenty of untapped revenue streams - for example mobile ads.
But as for the rest I think you're pretty spot on. I took a quick scan of GOOGs 2011 numbers and they have about the same profit margin and a better debt ratio than Facebook, so it's hard for me to see the justification for having 1/2 the market cap of GOOG with ~1/10th the revenue and 1/10th the net income.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.