The outcome of today has been predicted by many, so how did Facebook fair at its IPO? Not as well as was predicted. There are number of reasons that could have caused the stock to stay close to its opening price….
- NASDAQ was supposed to open Facebook at 11am, instead it waited until 11:30am.
- Could it have been that the stock was actually priced right? Perhaps the underwriters at Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs priced it perfectly? Perhaps they should have opened with the lower original proposed price in the upper $20′s
- Facebook was hit with a 15 billion dollar lawsuit this week. You can view the details here.
- Facebook may do wonders at help small businesses market – but overall the site’s financial value is over valued. You can read a wonderful article on this here.
- Or is it that people have a wait-and-see attitude?
Overall, it’s been a day of superlatives, as the world’s largest social network went public in what was expected to be and ultimately was the biggest IPO for any tech company and the third-largest for any company in the U.S., period. Facebook‘s long-awaited stock went public later than expected 11:30 a.m. today instead of 11 a.m., on account of a Nasdaq technical delay that reportedly resulted from the overwhelming demand for the stock, and it opened at a higher than expected $42.05 per share, instead of the expected $38 per share, after investors raised $16 billion for the network yesterday. Just 30 seconds after opening, 82 million stocks had been traded. By mid-afternoon, it had moved more stocks in its first day than GM, the exact company that very publicly and perhaps rather ceremonially announced earlier this week it had lost faith in Facebook’s ability to increase sales for the automaker and would pull its $10 million advertising budget from the network.
Financial publications have noted the stock didn’t stay up — in spite of the initial rush of the first several minutes, in which it peaked at $45 per share, the stock’s price dipped to $38 and change after about 20 minutes and closed at $38.23. Some reports place Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal take from the IPO at $19 billion or so.
Get more details here: Facebook’s IPO: You Knew It Was Coming.