Twitter Inc. is seeking as much as $1.4 billion in the largest Internet initial public offering since Facebook Inc., betting it can convince investors of its ability to turn 500 million tweets a day into profits. Twitter plans to sell 70 million shares at $17 to $20 each in the offering, according to a regulatory filing today. That would value the San Francisco-based company at $10.9 billion at the top end of the range, based on the 544.7 million common shares outstanding after the IPO. Theyre picking a slightly lower valuation to ensure that the IPO goes up on the first day of trading, Francis Gaskins, president of IPODesktop, said in an interview. I would definitely buy them in the offering at this valuation. The six-year-old short-messaging site, which draws more than 230 million monthly active users and has transformed the way people communicate, is taking advantage of renewed appetite for social-media stocks to sell a 13 percent stake. While the company has more than doubled revenue annually, it hasnt yet turned a profit and the pace of user gains is slowing. Still, Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo is betting the services popularity on mobile phones will help lure advertisers. Silicon Valleys Take Twitter is aiming to avoid the fate of Facebook, whose stock fell below its $38 debut price after its record $16 billion Internet IPO in May 2012, before finally rallying to close above that level in August. For Silicon Valley, a successful Twitter IPO will go a long way toward erasing the aftertaste from Facebooks IPO, which along with the poor stock market performances of Web companies like Zynga Inc. and Groupon Inc., shattered some confidence in consumer Internet companies. Following those offerings, venture capitalists and others shifted investing dollars to technology businesses that sold their products to other businesses, said Nihal Mehta, founder of LocalResponse Inc. and venture capitalist at Eniac Ventures. Now with Twitters debut and Facebook trading above its offering price, confidence in consumer technology has revived. Twitter will help escalate all the other advertising-based consumer companies, and create potential for more to be born, Mehta said. Were seeing more consumer deals than we ever have before. Boosting Social Media Twitters average revenue per user is less than half Facebooks, regulatory filings show. The service had 231.7 million average monthly active users in the three months through September, up 39 percent from the year-earlier period. That compares with 65 percent growth the prior year. With the money from the offering, Twitter may seek to expand globally and prove it can draw advertisers to the network. Advertisers can sponsor one of the services 140-character posts, paying to have it show up on users feeds even if they dont follow the company. About three-fourths of Twitters most active users accessed the service from mobile devices in the three months through September, compared with 69 percent in the year-earlier period, filings show. More than 70 percent of advertising revenue comes from those devices, a higher proportion than Facebooks. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is the lead underwriter of the IPO, joined by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Deutsche Bank AG, Allen & Co. and Code Advisors. Twitter has said it will list on the New York Stock Exchange and trade under the symbol TWTR. Co-founder Evan Williamss stake will drop to 10.4 percent from 12 percent after the offering, the filing shows. Hes the single biggest individual stockholder.
Posted on: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 22:00:45 +0000
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