Claudia Laffranchi, Swiss journalist was 49
Project months behind schedule
The social networking giant wants to raise $5 billion, according to its regulatory filing, with the company's valuation reaching as high as $100 million. At that level, Facebook would trade at 26.9 times 2011 sales, compared with about 5 times for Google. From Bloomberg:
"The $100 billion valuation that's being tossed around just puts it at a level we've never seen," said Jeffrey Sica, chief investment officer of Morristown, New Jersey-based Sica Wealth Management LLC, which oversees $1 billion. "They have to be able to show that not only do they deserve to be at that level, but they have multiple channels to create new revenue."
As for basics, Facebook revenue surged 88 percent, to $3.71 billion in 2011, and net income rose 65 percent, to $1 billion. A key metric is revenue from payment processing (what people sell on the site), which grew from $13 million in 2009 to $557 million in 2011. From DealBook:
"Facebook has become the biggest distribution platform on the Web," said Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, a service that accepts only Facebook users. "We noticed that users who connected our service to Facebook were three times more likely to become a paying user." But for all the promise of Facebook, the company is still trying to figure out how to properly extract and leverage data while keeping its ecosystem intact. For all its billions, Facebook makes a small sum on a per-user basis. Last year, it made a little more than $1 per user.
From the FT:
Facebook said it now has 845m monthly active users as of December 31, 2011, up 39 per cent from the year before. Daily active users are at 483m, up 48 per cent.
*Here's the filing.