Facebook launches the process of its IPO
The social network Facebook has reached, Wednesday 1 st February, the first stage of its IPO, the official record by filing with the U.S. authorities. Facebook revealed that it plans to put on the market about $ 5 billion of securities (3.8 billion), shattering all records for a company in the digital economy.
The site with 845 million users did not report the expected date of the transaction, which promises to be the biggest event on the financial markets. Banks Morgan Stanley , JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs were chosen as leaders of the operation, while Bofa Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital and Allen & Co will bookkeepers.
For its IPO, Facebook published for the first time financial data. According to documents released Wednesday, the social network has achieved annual sales of $ 3.71 billion for 2011, doubled in one year, together with a profit of $ 668 million (+ 79.5% in one year). Advertising accounted for 85% of its turnover.
With such a valuation, Facebook will have new financial resources, especially to face competition from Google, which weighs nearly 190 billion in stock. So far, the social network using funds to develop . A year ago, the social network and was raised to 1.5 billion dollars (1.1 billion euros), including 1 billion to clients of Goldman Sachs outside the United States. These funds were primarily used to acquire new companies in strategic sectors. This is particularly the case with the site location based Gowalla , in early December.
But the IPO is also a challenge for the company, which claims more than 800 million subscribers. Especially since Web companies recently traded find it difficult to take off . Site group purchasing Groupon to the music service Pandora, to the game publisher Zynga, the stock price decline or stagnate.
Unlike the young shoots of the Web, Facebook has also managed to create its own ecosystem. Since opening in 2007, third-party applications, social networking is also a platform, providing diverse content, from music to online, to even movie rentals.
But what Facebook could best take part is its “social graph” , a collection of users’ tastes. With the button “I love” , present on many websites, Facebook has a relatively narrow vision of its users. Facebook comes even to introduce new features, to develop social networks that use the “frictionless sharing” : once the user has allowed an application to share information, it can automatically send notifications to the all the friends of that user. Music services like Spotify and allows to display real-time pieces are listening to their users.
These data are valuable to advertisers, who can choose precisely with their ads that are distributed: men under 45 years of rock-loving, women working in commerce and equipped with a smartphone … Before submitting the application, research firm eMarketer estimated turnover of social network to 4.27 billion dollars (3.24 billion euros) in 2011, more than doubled compared to 2010 ($ 2 billion, or 1, 5 billion). Nearly 90% of this turnover is already done by advertising.
Facebook is also trying to expand the use of microtransactions, allowing the purchase of virtual goods, especially in gaming applications, it also grows on mobile, with applications and services regularly renewed. But the first social network in the world now needs to address the first signs of erosion of its growth: hegemonic in most major countries, Facebook has stagnated in the United States and some European countries, while its deployment continues Asia or Latin America. A trend that many others would disrupt : Twitter , but especially Google, which launched a major campaign to promote its social network Google +.
Articles Related to Facebook launches the process of its IPO
Facebook could file its record IPO Wednesday
The social network Facebook is preparing its record IPO and could drop Wednesday 1 st February, said Friday, Jan. 27, the Wall Street Journal . ...
Facebook Launching a Competitor Groupon
The social network Facebook has launched Tuesday, April 26, his service to obtain combined purchase discounts on products once a certain number of buyers have ...
Advertisements: Facebook than Yahoo in the U.S.
Facebook should delight this year to Yahoo's position as number one in terms of advertisements on the Internet in the United States, with about $ ...
eBay and Facebook Launch Partnership
At a conference in San Francisco , PayPal, owned by eBay, announced Wednesday, October 12, several new payment services ligne.Le service PayPal Access , allows ...
Facebook Should Go Public in the Spring
The social network Facebook is a date between April and June for its IPO, said Monday the Wall Street Journal on its website , citing ...
