A graphic included in Facebook's S-1 (click to enlarge)
The most highly anticipated initial public offering in today’s tech world is officially happening. Facebook filed S-1 documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday afternoon to raise a maximum of $5 billion.
The company plans to trade under the ticker symbol “FB.” According to the filing, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are the lead bookrunners on the IPO; Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclay’s Capital, and Allen & Company are also listed as underwriters.
Here are some of the key numbers revealed in the filing:
- Facebook made $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011, an 88 percent boost in year-over-year revenue compared to 2010, when the company made $1.97 billion in revenue.
- The company has been solidly profitable for at least three years — its net income for 2011 was a very cool $1 billion.
- Facebook has been saving up a nice bit of the cash it’s made: The company had $3.9 billion in cash and equivalents on its books as of the end of the 2011 calendar year.
- Facebook now has 845 million monthly active users and 483 million daily active users.
- Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s base salary was $500,000 in 2011; COO Sheryl Sandberg’s was $300,000.
- Zynga accounted for 12 percent of Facebook’s total revenues in 2011.
According to a letter written by Zuckerberg included in the S-1 filing, the money Facebook gets from an IPO will help it take advantage of the gold rush around increased worldwide connectivity to the Internet and the mobile devices boom. The letter reads in part:
“Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.
There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.”
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