Is Facebook getting ready to move into the stock market?
If it does, by all accounts it could be a record-breaking initial public offering. According to an unnamed source referenced by the Washington Post, the social networking behemoth is well into discussions about filing for such a position.
The site is reportedly looking to raise $10 billion in its IPO, a number that would bring the total valuation of Facebook at more than $100 billion. That’s an amount that most people could not even begin to conceptualize.
Such an initial public offering would be the highest-valued one ever in the technology sector. In fact, the current record holder in that category is Infineon Technologies AG, which raised $5.23 billion in its IPO. Facebook is looking to nearly double that.
And by comparison, Google’s IPO in 2004 raised a paltry $1.67 billion. So Facebook is an unabashed force to be reckoned with. The company would join a line of other social networks moving into the stock market world. Companies like Groupon and Zynga are trying to put social networking in the forefront of the trading community.
Of course, Facebook has said nothing official about these plans but it seems only natural that this would be the next step. In fact, to many it probably seems like this step should have been taken a while ago.
Either way, there’s certainly nothing but high roads in Facebook’s sights right now and it’s going to do whatever it can to continue that momentum.
