Twitter Inc has set a price of US$26 per share for its initial public offering (IPO), which means the company’s stock could begin trading yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange in the most highly anticipated IPO since Facebook’s debut last year.
The price values Twitter at more than US$18 billion based on its outstanding stock, options and restricted stock that will be available after the IPO.
That is more than Macy’s, which has a market capitalization of US$17 billion, and Bed Bath & Beyond, which is about US$16 billion.
Photo: Reuters
The pricing means the short messaging service will raise US$1.8 billion in the New York offering, before expenses.
The company is offering 70 million shares in the IPO, plus an option to buy another 10.5 million. If all the shares were sold, the IPO would raise US$2.09 billion, making it the biggest IPO for an Internet company since Facebook raised US$16 billion last year.
The company, named after the sound of a chirping bird, was set to begin trading yesterday morning under the ticker symbol “TWTR.”
Twitter’s public debut would be one of the most closely watched IPOs since Facebook’s in May last year, but Twitter has valued itself at just a fraction of Facebook and sought to cool expectations in the months and weeks leading up to the offering.
With that, the San Francisco-based company is likely hoping its stock avoids the fate of Facebook’s shares, which did not surpass their IPO price until more than a year after the offering.
Still, US$18 billion is a lofty valuation for Twitter compared with its peers.
At its current price, Twitter is valued at roughly 28 times its projected revenue this year — US$650 million based on its current growth rate. In comparison, Facebook trades at about 16 times its projected revenue this year, according to analyst forecasts from FactSet.
Google Inc, meanwhile, is trading at about seven times its net revenue, the figure Wall Street follows that excludes advertising commissions.
Research firm Outsell Inc puts Twitter’s fundamental value at about half of the IPO price, analyst Ken Doctor said.
Outsell’s figure is based on factors such as revenue and revenue growth.
“That’s not unusual,” Doctor said.
“Especially for tech companies. You are betting on a big future,” he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained