Despite harsh criticism of Mark Zuckerberg’s less-than-professional fashion preferences and investors opinion that Facebook is way overvalued, demand for the stock already has investors lining up to get a piece of the social network.
According to Yahoo news, a source close to Wall Street says, Investors are already taking orders, and in many cases, need to call around trying to secure more. The company is offering over 337 million shares to go on sale the 18th of this month, but if demand is high enough it could be they will offer more.
Recently the Facebook team has been the subject of scrutiny due to a failure to generate advertising revenue as fast as they add new users. In fact, advertising is almost non-existant on a mobile platform, and in general, advertisers are unhappy about the availability of premium advertising space.
There has been little reaction form the Facebook’s financial team other than an amendment to their Securities and Exchange Commission S1 filing citing a challenge to growth with mobile Facebook browsing. Despite that fact, I expect we’ll see action from Facebook on the mobile advertising platform soon; reacting slowly isn’t what got them to where they are today.
It should come as no surprise that investor demand is so high for Facebook, it is one of the most anticipated public offerings since Google went public and the buzz surrounding it has brought the company more free press than most others will ever get. I can’t wait to see what happens. I’ll keep you posted as new information becomes available.