Will Facebook go public and start selling stock next year?
2012 may be the big year for Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerburg, regardless of his efforts to keep the social media empire private.
I’m no financial genius, far from it actually. But I do know that when something I utilize on a regular basis fires up all the money media outlets, and has them ranting at the possibility of the company becoming publicly traded, I listen. In fact, I may even open up my wallet from my back pocket and allow the moths to fly out, while searching for a few dollars in order to buy a share or two.
It seems that having a Facebook page has become quite the norm. Surely almost 500 million people all over the world can’t be wrong! And even though the social media empire can basically go public at any particular time it wants to, Zuckerburg has in fact thwarted the push for the company to be traded off publicly. With Facebook already standing as one of the largest domain addresses on the internet, it appears that going by a recent report, the networking monolith is setting itself up to either hold an initial public offering or look to disclose its financial results. CNN has reported that Goldman Sachs is in the process of distributing information to various clients who might be interested in handing over dollars to join a so-called Facebook investment pool. Previous reports indicated that the last private common stock sale valued the company at $11 Billion, which is yet to be seen as some what as a rational figure.
I’m certainly not voicing my opinion as someone professing to be a financial guru, and I certainly don’t participate or rotate in the money media circuit. However, I wonder how a company such as Facebook provides an advertising dollar amount to prospective investors? In saying that, the social media juggernaught is said to beat its $550 Million revenue projection.
So, certainly for the financially driven of the world, there are some exciting times ahead. As for me, I’ll continue to log on to my page, check out what people are saying, send out a few messages to friends, and perhaps change my relationship status to ‘complicated’. Why complicated? Because that’s how I’m going to feel if the social media giant ends up on the stock exchange. I’m not qualified to say whether the company should be invested in. But if I use it every day, along with almost half a billion people all over the world, Zuckerburg and his crew must be doing something right.
references: (http://money.cnn.com/2011/01/06/technology/facebook_ipo_2012/)
(http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/21/most-recent-facebook-common-stock-sale-values-company-at-11-billion/
(http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/19/facebook-turns-down-8-billion-valuation-term-sheet-claims-2009-revenues-to-be-550-million/