Twitter has filed for its long-awaited IPO (initial public offering), the company announced via its on Twitter page on Thursday.
The announcement has led to much excitement from other news and business news outlets – as well as investors – because the filing of S-1 will give the public its first true look into Twitter's financial numbers.
"S-1 IPO filings with the SEC require that the company disclose its historic and current revenues, profits and balance sheet holdings, prior to selling stock to the public," said the website Business Insider.
This year, the micro-blogging company is expected to do over $500 million in revenues and has grabbed over $1 billion from investors.
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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
Now, back to work. pic.twitter.com/e4lK8e7pY9
— Twitter (@twitter) September 12, 2013
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On Saturday, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Twitter's relatively new financial chief, Mike Gupta, was talking to banks about handling the company's IPO.
*UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg have reported that Goldman Sachs will handle Twitter's IPO as its lead underwriter, despite its involvement in the opening of Facebook's stock with lost billions of dollars for investors and resulted in a lawsuit aimed at Goldman Sachs.
The move is arguably the most-anticipated IPO filing since Facebook, the other of the world's two highest-profile social media sites. Facebook's stock hit Wall Street on May 18, 2012, and opened to now infamous disappointing numbers.
Facebook's IPO started with a peak market capitalization of $104 billion, and shot up to an early high of $45 per share, which fell to $38.23 at the end of the first day, just $38.00 above its initial offering.
After 68 days, Facebook's stock had fallen to $20.011 per share, a net change of negative 47 per cent.
Because of the swell and subsequent drop following Facebook's IPO, it leaves some to worry about a company like Twitter which, although not following the exact same model, is still a "social media" company that has built its revenue on perhaps an unequal share of online advertising revenue, fund investment, and presumed value.
"A lot of people are trying to understand, 'How does this thing work? How does it make money?'" said Peter Fenton, a Twitter director and partner at Benchmark Capital who conveyed confidence in Twitter CEO Dick Castolo, who came over from Yahoo.
"He has a layman's ability to simplify and express it in a way that's not overly complicated."
Estimates have Twitter increasing their advertising revenue to $1 billion for next year.
