Jan 072013
 

stocksandbonds

The Chinese calendar might have it pegged as the year of the black snake, but investors are already calling 2013 the year of the enterprise IPO. Not nearly as catchy as something reptilian, but hopefully a lot more profitable than the newly public consumer companies, Facebook chief among them, that took a beating in the public markets in 2012.

Consistent with the enterprise theme, we already know that data-center networking company Gigamon and solid-state storage business Violin Memory have filed their S-1 forms. Other enterprise plays will follow. And just because the smart money is betting on companies that get paid selling to other companies, doesn’t mean some well-known consumer outfits, including Twitter, Square, and Evernote couldn’t try their luck with an IPO in 2013.

We picked nine private companies with public market potential to watch in 2013. For each we weigh the odds of whether, market conditions permitting, of course, they have a shot or not.

MORE:  IPO Lottery 2013: 10 Companies to Watch | Wired Business | Wired.com.

 

 


 

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.

 


Jan 282012
 

Investors have been salivating over the possibilities for years, and according to the Wall Street Journal, the wait is nearly over. Facebook is going to file for its IPO next week with a company valuation of between $75 an $100 billion. Not only will the IPO let people own a piece of Facebook, but this will finally let employees cash out those stock options.

READ MORE:

via Maximum PC | WSJ: Facebook IPO Filing Coming Next Week.

Sep 082011
 

The drumbeat heralding the demise, or at least leveling off, of the daily deal market has been picking up in recent days. Most recently, news broke that Groupon was delaying its IPO.

Other worrisome recent events for the industry: Facebook has pulled its Daily Deal offering; Yelp is scaling back its sales force for these products. Experian Hitwise reported a significant drop-off in Groupon traffic this summer; according to PriceGrabber’s Local Deals Survey, 52% of respondents expressed feeling overwhelmed by the number of daily deal emails they receive.

via Dying Or Still Evolving? Industry Continues to Bet on the Latter for Daily Deals – MarketingVOX.