Facebook
Inc. FB 0.00% is nearing the last step before its landmark initial public
offering by finalizing the price for its shares later Thursday.
The
social network earlier this week raised the price range for its IPO to $34 to
$38 a share, from $28 to $35 a share, in a sign of investor appetite for the
offering. The initial price range put Facebook's valuation at $77 billion to
$96 billion, but that rises to $93 billion to $104 billion under the new range
as investor interest ramps up.
At
a potential offering size of $18.4 billion, Facebook would become the
second-largest U.S. IPO of all time behind Visa Inc.'s V -0.45% 2008 offering
worth $19.65 billion, according to Dealogic. It could exceed Visa if the share
price ultimately lands at $41 a share or higher.
Facebook's
IPO is a crowning moment for Silicon Valley's
latest tech boom. Last year, Web companies from LinkedIn Corp., LNKD -5.89%
Groupon Inc. GRPN -4.75% and Zynga Inc. ZNGA -0.96% went public in the first
sustained drumbeat of Internet offerings for years.
That
has continued this year, with Internet companies such as Yelp Inc. going
public, while enterprise-technology companies such as Splunk Inc. also staged
strong IPOs. Other Web companies that are still closely held, such as Twitter
Inc. and Dropbox Inc., are viewed as possible IPO candidates in the future.
Facebook
said Wednesday it would boost the size of its IPO by 25%, or about 100 million
shares, as early investors sell as much as $3.8 billion in additional shares.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., GS +0.19% Tiger Global Management and Facebook
director Peter Thiel—who was one of the social network's first investors—more
than doubled the amount of stock they plan to sell.
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