A couple of weeks ago, rumors were circulating that Facebook was getting very close to filing for its IPO. A rumor reportedly going around among Facebook employees suggested that Facebook’s S1 filing could come as soon as December.
According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, who is citing “people familiar with the matter,” Facebook is looking at somewhere between April and June 2012 for its IPO, aiming to raise $10 billion and a $100 billion valuation.
The valuation wouldn’t be too far off of the current trends we’ve already seen. Valuation estimates as recent as September already had the company valued at about $80 billion. You can see the steady growth in reported valuations over the past few years in this nice graph shared by Jolie O’Dell at Venturebeat recently:
Some notable tweets on the subject:
@dmac1
Doug MacMillanAt $10 billion, Facebook could become the biggest tech IPO, dwarfing Infineon’s $5.23B and Agere Systems’ $4.14B IPO http://t.co/lzLZHKws
10 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto
@mathewi
Mathew Ingramin case you’re wondering, a $100 billion market cap for Facebook would put them in the same ballpark as GE and Verizon — fair? 13 hours ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto
@demandrichard
Richard RosenblattSomeone questioning FACEBOOK ‘s value in an IPO and comparing it to GRPN: blasphemy http://t.co/mEGEMWHe @forbes 2 days ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto
@ajt2189
Alex ThomasLess interested in the $ amount, and more so in where FB goes post-IPO: http://t.co/Yvkq4O15 (via @globeandmail) 17 minutes ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto
@hkanji
hussein kanjiA Facebook IPO at $100B would make it worth more than Cisco, Amazon and Disney http://t.co/DBBCSeRH 19 minutes ago via Socialyzer App · powered by @socialditto
@nicolasgamard
nicolas.gamard1-month performances of some tech stocks: LNKD -35%, CRM -20%, GRPN -25%. Can Facebook really IPO at $100Bn valuation? 20 minutes ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto
Facebook’s primary means of income is under scrutiny in Europe. The European Commission is reportedly set to introduce an initiative in January, which would ban the kind of targeted advertising that Facebook ads are based on. It will be interesting to see how this affects the IPO.