Facebook To Go Public On Friday, May 18 182
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."
Elephant in the room (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone have to say it: Bubble
There.
Best avoided (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It isn't Facebook that's being valued... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Best avoided (Score:5, Insightful)
There are very few companies like Facebook whom have no documented source of their income. They are under legal obligation to provide investors with mission & earning statements.
I've read a lot of them.
You will find precious little detail in the revenue side of a 10K. You get exactly what they want you to get, while sales data is masked and obfuscated and aggregated to the point that you can't tell anything from the Balance sheet. Entire massive R&D projects can be hidden on the costs side of the ledger, such that companies like Apple can spring an entire new concept in in smart phones after three years of development with no one having any clear idea of the cost involved, or even that the project was underway from reading financial statements and annual reports.
Seriously, if you think Sarbanes–Oxley or GAAP rules or SEC regulations provide any clarity or a level playing field you are delusional.
Re:Elephant in the room (Score:4, Insightful)
Facebook is indeed profitable.
But merely a fad. Just as much as AOL chat rooms, Friendster and MySpace, and possibly even YouTube and Twitter.
There's nothing demanding that users continue to user Facebook, nothing binds their behavior, and worst of all, user interest can easily evaporate overnight.
Re:Organ donations ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
NO. Not a bubble (Score:2, Insightful)
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!
Re:Elephant in the room (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course the normal Facebook user doesn't pay anything. They are the product not the customer. Facebook's customers are all the companies that advertise on it, or buy people's private data.
Re:Elephant in the room (Score:3, Insightful)
The same way Google makes a profit: spying on you.
You can hardly call it spying when the sheep willingly post the details of their daily life voluntarily.
Re:Elephant in the room (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, you wouldn't want to end up like one of those fools that bought Google stock from August 2004 - Dec 2005 and sold it at literally any time that wasn't Oct 2008 - May 2009. Or even worse, one of those morons that bought it in the first month when it was under $150 a share! I bet they feel dumb now for buying stock in a company that's already successful.
Re:Elephant in the room (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Organ donations ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.