Facebook IPO offering amount $10 billion - Web Reaction

Nothing like another Facebook IPO story to shake off the Cyber Monday egg counting.

Reacting to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal scoop that Facebook was looking at the April to June 2012 timeframe to raise $10 billion in an IPO, reporters and analysts were quick to point out their lack of surprise.

As many noted, Facebook is required to file financial reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission when the number of private shareholders tops 500. Facebook has indicated that it will exceed that number by the end of the 2011 calendar year, meaning that the company would have to file with the SEC by April 30, 2012, whether it is public or not.

Yet even after citing this fact, the tech media has lifted Facebook’s IPO talk to “cacophonous levels,” in the words of VentureBeat.

It could be the IPO offering amount cited by The Journal: $10 billion. An offering of that size would raise more money than any other technology IPO, says Bloomberg, which lists the current record holder, Infineon Technologies AG, at the comparatively puny amount of $5.23 billion in 1999. Facebook rival Google raised $1.67 billion in its 2004 IPO.

That IPO offering would be based on a $100 billion valuation, more than Cisco, Disney and Amazon, but less than Intel, which is worth $119 billion, according to ZDNet. The Journal’s Geoffrey A. Fowler writes with that type of valuation, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would be worth $24 billion, richer than Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Also blame part of the “cacophonous levels” on the current Wall Street challenges endured lately by Groupon and LinkedIn. In the past five days Groupon shares have fallen 42%. LinkedIn shares are also sagging. After reporting excessively about the public debuts of these two social networking companies, tech reporters are dying to find out what happens when the big kahuna finally goes public.

Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/11/29/web-reactions-to-facebook-ipo-story/