After privately signalling its intentions last month, Twitter has taken the next step to its long-awaited stock market floatation by officially filing papers with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
In submitting the requisite S-1 document, which became available to the public on Thursday, Twitter announced that it has now amassed 215m monthly active users, with 100m of those users checking out their timelines or sending tweets every single day. Those 215m users are sending 500 million tweets a day.
The filing could value the company at $15 billion and could earn Twitter (which will trade under the monicker TWTR) a $1 billion injection of cash.
However, the company, which has 2,000 employees, is yet to price its shares. That step will happen once it has made a case to potential shareholders. Neither has it announced a date for the Initial Public Offering.
One noteworthy discovery within the S-1 document is that Twitter is yet to turn a profit, seven years after the first tweet was sent The company, which now makes most of its cash (65 per cent) from mobile advertising. The filing states that although Twitter raked in $253.6m in the first six months of 2013, it posted a net loss of $69.3 million. That's a 41 per cent increase.
Twitter will hope the IPO process runs smoother than Facebook's floatation in earlier this year. The company's share price nosedived following its IPO, cutting the value of the company in half before rebounding this summer.
The social network will also be aware of the other struggles endured by tech companies floating on the stock exchange. Zynga especially has endured a really tough time recently, but then again Zynga is not Twitter and given its standing on the global stage and its ever growing influence on news, celebrity, politics and practically everything else, Twitter can expect a better return.
Via The Verge
