Facebook announces initial IPO price range of $28 to $35

 Internet News
May 042012
 

Facebook is slated to set its price range for its initial public offering (IPO) at $28 to $35, according to an amended filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. The company is expected to be publicly listed on the NASDAQ exchange on May 18 under the ticker symbol “FB.”

“Facebook, Inc. is offering 180,000,000 shares of its Class A common stock and the selling stockholders are offering 157,415,352 shares of Class A common stock,” the company wrote in the S-1 filing.

“We will not receive any proceeds from the sale of shares by the selling stockholders. This is our initial public offering and no public market currently exists for our shares of Class A common stock. We anticipate that the initial public offering price will be between $28.00 and $35.00 per share.”

However, one WSJ reporter also noted on Twitter that some investors, including Peter Thiel (founder of PayPal and venture capitalist), Microsoft, Greylock (another VC firm), and CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself are already looking to cash in to some degree before the IPO on non-public stock that they had held so far.

At the listed opening price range, the company is expected to raise over $13 billion, and would put its market capitalization, or estimated total worth, in the $77 to $96 billion range, just shy of Amazon’s current value and about twice that of HP’s. But that’s still relatively low compared to the Silicon Valley titans. By comparison, Google’s market cap is at about $200 billion, and Apple is hovering around $540 billion.

SOURCE: Facebook announces initial IPO price range of $28 to $35.