SAN FRANCISCO: When Facebook Inc was preparing to go public last year, the telephones at Granite Investment Advisors rang off the hook as clients called about the social media’s company’s highly anticipated debut.
In stark contrast, the investment company has not fielded any calls about Twitter as of Friday morning. “Not a single call yet,” said Tim Lesko, the principal at Granite Investment Advisors, who added that he himself will hold back until he sees a few more quarters of financial results.
As Twitter Inc races toward the year’s most hotly anticipated tech offering, memories of Facebook Inc’s disappointing 2012 debut are dampening enthusiasm for shares of the eight-year-old online messaging service.
Like Facebook, Twitter enjoys strong brand recognition , which typically translates to outsized retail investor interest. That was one of the reasons Facebook was able to raise its IPO price to $38 a share, giving the company a valuation of $100bn, or about 99 times its 2011 earnings.
Facebook shares plummeted on their first day of trading and continued to decline in the following months. It did not regain its IPO valuation until more than a year later, in August this year. Twitter, which is expected to go public some time before Thanksgiving, has yet to determine pricing, but investors say it might come under pressure from its financial backers to go high. Analysts expect the company, which posted a $69m loss last year, to seek a valuation of at least $10bn.
From 2012’s March quarter to the June quarter of 2013, Twitter’s monthly active users leapt 58 percent to an average of about 218 million. But users grew just 6.9 percent between the second quarter and the first, and 10.3 percent from the fourth quarter to 2013’s first quarter.
“Timeline views,” a measure of how many times a user refreshes his or her stream of tweets, grew 10.7 percent in the second quarter to almost 151 billion, and 16.1 percent to 136.3 billion in the first.
Reuters
