Twitter has announced it will sell shares and float on the stock market in secret IPO
- From: News Corp Australia Network
- September 13, 2013
TWITTER is going public. The short messaging service aptly tweeted on Thursday it has filed confidential documents for an initial public offering of stock.
But the documents are sealed, as Twitter is taking advantage of federal legislation passed last year that allows companies with less than $1 billion in revenue in its last fiscal year to avoid submitting public IPO documents.
San Francisco-based Twitter Inc. posted on its official Twitter account that it has ``confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO.''
The confidentiality will likely help Twitter avoid the public hoopla that surrounded the initial public offerings of other high-profile social networking companies, including Facebook Inc., which went public in May 2012.
We've confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.— Twitter (@twitter) September 12, 2013
Twitter was founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, and has grown to more than 200 million users who share their thoughts in bursts of no more than 140 characters at least once a month, with estimates of total users surpassing 500 million. Twitter's massive growth has produced strong IPO buzz for years, but neighbour Facebook's rough Wall Street debut quieted much of the excitement: The Menlo Park, California, company exercised a record-breaking IPO in May 2012 that valued CEO Mark Zuckerberg's creation at more than $US100 billion, but problems with initial trades and doubts about Facebook's ability to generate revenues helped push shares from an initial price of $US38 to less than $US20 in the first year of public availability.
Facebook Inc. stock has rebounded of late, however, pushing to an all-time high of more than $US45 Wednesday after the company's most recent earnings report showed strong gains in mobile revenues. The IPO market has also fully rebounded after a lull following Facebook's debut, with seven San Francisco Bay Area companies filing to go public in August.
"There's more of an appetite for IPOs than there's been in some time,'' Thomas Kellerman, an attorney with Morgan Lewis in Palo Alto, California, who co-chairs the firm's tech practice, told the San Jose Mercury News last month.
Twitter's IPO has been long expected. The company has been ramping up its advertising products and working to boost ad revenue in preparation.
Goldman Sachs is to be the lead underwriter for the IPO.
Now, back to work. pic.twitter.com/e4lK8e7pY9— Twitter (@twitter) September 12, 2013