Twitter’s IPO, of course, is going like the proverbial, well, IPO hippo, opening at over $45 per share. That’s more than double the $26 price that Twitter had set for each of the 70 million shares as of Wednesday night.
The “fail whale” has rarely been seen in the past few years, as Twitter has successfully worked to eliminate service outages. Lu also developed a “Success Loch Ness” image to celebrate Twitter’s succes at keeping the site up and stable, something that Twitter hand struggled with during the early days ofT the service.
According to Lu, the “fail whale” was originally an elephant, part of a series of images the artist had worked on over the course of about five years.
“Five years after creating the original ‘Lifting a Dreamer’ sketch, I was returning once again to Australia after my exchange study at Central Saint Martins in London, and I created an updated version of my ‘birds lifting an elephant’ image,” Lu writes in herhistory of the sketch.
“This was in early 2007. This time, instead of pencil and paper, I created a vector graphic with color and smaller size to send via email," Lu wrote. "And this time, instead of an elephant, it featured a whale–since I was living in New South *Whales*. Which as I recall seemed really clever at the time!”
Via: TechHive
Twitter Inc raised the top end of its IPO price range by 25 percent and will close its books a day early, signaling strong demand for the most closely watched Silicon Valley debut since Facebook Inc last year.
Amid a red-hot market for initial public offerings and soaring equity markets, Twitter raised its price range to $23 to $25 per share on Monday, but kept the offering size at 70 million shares. That means it will raise up to $2 billion if an overallotment option of 10.5 million shares is exercised.
Sources close to the situation said demand among institutional investors was so strong that the final pricing is likely to go even higher than the new range announced on Monday. The sources declined to be identified because the sales process is not public.
The microblogging network, which has yet to turn a profit, has amassed 230 million users in seven years, including heads of state, celebrities and activists. About half of all U.S. adult Twitter users said they get news through the social media platform, according to a Pew Research survey.
Twitter is the best known Silicon Valley company to go public since Facebook, though it is seeking a far smaller valuation of up to $13.6 billion compared to Facebook's $100 billion.
One of the sources said Twitter's IPO is now "massively" oversubscribed and underwriters are looking to select investors who plan to hold the stock for a longer duration rather than traders wanting to do a quick flip.
Some funds that ordinarily do not buy IPO shares were seeking allocations of up to 10 percent, but were unlikely to get them, according to the source who requested anonymity.
Twitter plans to close the books on the IPO on Tuesday at 12 p.m. EST (1700 GMT), a day earlier than scheduled, because of strong demand, according to two sources with knowledge of the process.
The IPO is set to price on Wednesday, with shares to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. The previous price range was $17 to $20 a share.
The new pricing would value the company at up to $13.6 billion, or about 12.5 to 13.6 times forecast 2014 revenue of $1 billion, according to eMarketer. Both Facebook and LinkedIn Corp trade at about 12 times forecast 2014 revenue.
Several equity research analysts said they expect Twitter shares to rise after they begin trading, with some setting their one-year price target as high as $52.
"We would participate within the $23-$25 range, albeit, simple math would dictate that management should price at the bottom end of the new range," BTIG's Richard Greenfield said in a note Monday after the price was raised.
RED-HOT MARKET
Year to date, 2013 has been the strongest for IPOs since 2007 in the United States, with more than 178 companies going public, according to Thomson Reuters data. Equity markets are climbing and investor uncertainty has subsided, at least for now, over the U.S. debt ceiling crisis and political gridlock.
Shares of Container Store Group Inc doubled on their first day of trade on November 1, joining strong debuts from more than half a dozen companies, including restaurant chains Noodles & Co and Potbelly Corp and software company Benefitfocus Inc.
Twitter management has been traveling the United States over the past week, speaking with potential investors.
On Monday, they pitched about 120 investors over lunch at the San Francisco Ritz Carlton but did not encounter any questions about the newly proposed IPO price range.
Instead, investors focused on Twitter's fundamental business and asked about its plans to make money outside the United States and its headcount projections, which have contributed to the company's ballooning costs, according to several people who were present.
Twitter executives were scheduled to hold one-on-one meetings with investors Monday afternoon before traveling to Los Angeles for meetings on Tuesday.
Source : Reuters
The amount of buzz surrounding Twitter's (TWTR) upcoming initial public offering is nearly tangible. The social media platform is expected to raise as much as $1.6 billion, making it the biggest technology IPO since Facebook (FB) went public in May 2012 and raised a record $16 billion -- and investors big and small want a piece of the pie.
The problem is, there's only so much pie to go around -- about 70 million slices, each priced between $17 and $20 -- and access to the pie is not necessarily equitable.
Twitter is expected to hit the public markets on Nov. 7, which will make the stock accessible to the average retail investor. But before that happens -- before the pie is sliced and set out to eat, so to speak -- institutional investors, or those with deep pockets, get the kind of privileged access to shares that only money can buy.
Relatively few investors actually get allocated stock at the IPO price, while the rest are left to buy at whatever the market commands, and history has shown that highly hyped stocks (like Twitter) often command enormous prices relative to actual earnings.
Data compiled by Forbes shows that of all the IPOs priced since Sept. 12, 19 have returned over 20%, averaging a 69% gain over just a few weeks. On average, these stocks opened for trading on the day of their IPO at a price 49% higher than the IPO price and only experienced 9% further upside on average the rest of that trading session.
In other words, most of the gains were made on the first trade from those relatively few who were allocated slices of pie before it was served to the retail investor. These few experience the vast majority of the gains attributed to post-IPO price pops. Those who have to buy once shares actually go public earn much more modest returns (and sometimes lose out over the short term, as was the case with Facebook).
So what's the average investor to do?
Roll high
This is not necessarily serious advice, but it will hopefully be illustrative and reveal how certain people get access to the pie before others. The short answer, of course, is money.
The gatekeepers (aka underwriters) of Twitter's IPO are Goldman Sachs (GS), JPMorgan Chase (JPM) and Morgan Stanley (MS) -- the same banks that led Facebook's IPO, incidentally.
These are the guys who play middleman between the company and the public, the money managers who structure the IPO and, well, manage the money. The banks will either buy the entire IPO from the company and resell it to the public, or make a so-called best effort to sell as many shares as they can.
They are the guys you go to if you've got a couple hundred grand burning a hole in your pocket -- typically, institutional investors, such as hedge funds, or wealthy individuals hungry for yield in this wonky, low-rate market in which we seem to be trapped.
Most of us, though, don't have a few hundred grand in our pockets (or our savings accounts, for that matter).
Tap the secondary market
Twitter is not yet public, but that doesn't mean there aren't shares of the company floating around out there, populating the "high-growth" sections of investment portfolios. Twitter, and pretty much every other company under the sun, will issue various forms of equity while still a private company, either as compensation to employees, payment for an acquisition or to large private investors. These are sometimes laden with so many terms and conditions of sale that they are frozen solid for months or even years, but sometimes they are able to be traded, albeit in what would be considered an illiquid market.
Enter services such as SecondMarket and SharesPost, which are both platforms that enable those who hold private equity in companies like Twitter to transact with interested investors outside the regular circle of insiders. This, of course, is no sure thing -- the barrier to entry in terms of raw dollars can still be very high -- but it's an option to consider.
Source : USA Today
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