Facebook just released their pricing for the upcoming IPO. The shares will sell between $28 and $35 per share. Revealed today in their SEC regulatory filing, the company seeks to sell 337.4 billion shares, which could make the social networking giant as much as $13.6 billion. Sounds pretty okay to me.
It also puts Facebook in the position of being the most valuable web company at the time of IPO filing in US history. Though many in the industry predicted a $100 billion valuation for Facebook at the time of filing, the actual numbers, between $77 and $96 billion, are closer to numbers we reported on from an analyst’s most recent calculations of $90 billion.
According to Capstone analyst Rory Maher, the reason for the lower valuation is a slowed revenue growth year-over-year, not as much traction from premiums ads as they expected, and lower EBITDA margins. Obviously some of these factors did effect their pricing strategy.
As you may recall, Facebook will be traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker symbol “FB”. Final pricing and subsequent trading are still about 15 days off, so as always, things could still change. This might be good news for those who believe the stock pricing is a little on the conservative side.
We’ll have to see how well the stock performs as the year unfolds, but there’s no doubt investors will be lining up on the day the shares go on sale. If there’s any concerns over the financial performance of the social site it sure hasn’t been shown by CEO Zuckerberg. We can look for him on the IPO roadshow later this month. As always, you can read about all the Facebook IPO news here.
