The 140 character social network or as some still prefer to call it the micro blogging tool, Twitter will ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday to celebrate the listing. The company that will trade under the TWTR symbol, has announced that it will price its IPO at $26 per share when it begins trading. Twitter plans to sell 70 million shares out of a total of 545 million outstanding shares.
According to TC, with $26 per share the company will net it to $1.82 billion. This would also mean that the company has a valuation of $14.16 billion based on 545 million non-diluted shares or a maximum of approximately $18.1 billion based on 705 million fully diluted shares.
We just priced our IPO. pic.twitter.com/NWXaO4Myq0
— Twitter (@twitter) November 6, 2013
However, when Twitter had filed for its long anticipated IPO earlier in the month of October, it had planned to offer 70 million shares in its initial public offering priced at $17-$20 per share. With the maximum of $20 pricing, the company was then valued to $11B, which was lower than the close to $15 billion that had been rumored.
Over the time, the pricing chatter has increased for the network which has more than 215 million monthly active users. Though with the new pricing, Twitter is still better off to start with comparing the $38 per share of Facebook during its IPO. An IPO that Facebook itself doesn’t want to talk about and during that time the social networking giant wasn’t making anything from mobile. In comparison, 75 percent of monthly active users are accessing Twitter from a mobile device and 65 percent of advertising revenue is generated from mobile devices, as reported in Q2 FY2013.
Nevertheless, Twitter has its own challenges such as lower percentage of international revenues and the ever growing threat from Asian messaging apps. So it would be interesting to note how the company performs when it rings the bell later in the day with a $26 per share.