Over the last few months there have been increasing amounts of speculation about the Facebook IPO with the company valuations being put between $75bn and $100bn.
Originally it was rumoured that investment bank Goldman Sachs who were to play the lead role in the sale but sources have indicated that this has now changed and Morgan Stanley will be the underwriters for a 10% stake in the company. Although it should be noted that Goldman Sachs is still expected to play a significant role in the IPO.
At the moment Facebook are keeping tight-lipped about the IPO but over the last week Facebook halted it’s trading in secondary markets for three days further adding to the speculation that the IPO will happen. Given the things that have been happening in in Palo Alto, CA Facebook could file documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission as early as this coming Wednesday,” the report in the WSJ quoted a person familiar with the matter as saying.
Although a filing next week is “just one scenario” Facebook executives are considering, it said, adding that executives are also looking at dates later than next week possibly between April and June.
For a social network site started by Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard dorm, that has grown in a very short period of time to more than 800 million users and 3,000 employees it valuation dwarfs that of Google’s 2005 IPO of just below $2 billion.
