Twitter Inc. will begin life Thursday as a publicly traded company amidst a stock market buzz not seen since Facebook’s disastrous IPO.
The social media network co-founded by Jack Dorsey, a former punk rocker turned computer programmer, is scheduled to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange. On Wednesday night the company set a price of $26 (U.S.) for its initial public offering of stock.
The offering could raise more than $2 billion for the seven-year old San Francisco-based firm. The IPO will be the most closely watched by a social media company since Facebook’s debut 18 months earlier, which was initially hampered by a computer glitch on the Nasdaq, Facebook shares fell by half within the first three months and took more than a year to recover.
Twitter however, is expected to fare better. With most of the world’s trusted news media outlets regularly using tweets to distribute their content not to mention the President of the United States and many other trusted sources. Some investors are betting shares in the service could be worth 50 per cent more than the IPO price by next June.
You have to remember Twitter is about a fifth the size of Facebooks 1 billion plus userbase. Facebooks annual revenue at it’s debut was $3.7 billion while Twitters 2012 revenue was $317 million. Nonetheless we are all eager to see what happens when the bell rings today!
