The Palo Alto social networking firm is planning to go public between April and June 2012 for, said people familiar with the matter. The company is exploring raising $10 billion in its IPO. The deal that might assign Facebook a $100 billion valuation would be one of the largest offerings ever- bigger than other social media IPOs like LinkedIn, Groupon and Pandora.
A Facebook IPO has been hotly anticipated for couple of years now but the company has never really been vocal about whether it would even make such an offering and has been pretty tight-lipped on timing of an IPO. "We're not going to participate in speculation about an IPO," said Facebook spokesman Larry Yu.
Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg who has in the past publicly expressed reluctance to do an IPO and opted to keep Facebook private longer than many suspected he would, admitted in an interview earlier this month on the television program Charlie Rose that an IPO would serve as a reward to his employees.
“You know, we’ve made this implicit promise to our investors and to our employees that by compensating them with equity and by giving them equity, that at some point we’re going to make that equity worth something publicly and liquidly, in a liquid way.”
Investors have been increasingly eager to buy shares of Facebook on special, secondary-market exchanges.
Facebook is now in internal discussions over the timing of its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and will be required to make its financial information public by April, because the company will cross the 500-shareholder limit by the end of this year.
