14 DAY TRIAL // After months of anticipation, Twitter announced it was going public. The company informed everyone through a tweet that it had filed with the SEC to go public.
Currently, Twitter is valued at some $10 billion (€7.5 billion) and the IPO is supposed to provide the company with a huge stash of cash to help it compete with the likes of Google, Facebook, and Yahoo.
The filing signed by Twitter is marked as “confidential” or otherwise known as a “secret” IPO. This means that, while the company’s stock will become available, the general public won’t get to peak into the exact financial situation of the company (as it happens with a regular public offering) yet.
This is a feature that is available only for companies that have less than $1 billion (€750 million) in revenue.
Twitter will still have to inform the investors of the financial situation, but this will only be required three weeks before the road show, namely the marketing campaign of the public offering.
So far, there’s been no information regarding the stock package the company is offering, an official date when stock will be available for trading, or an estimate price per share.
Twitter has denied any rumors regarding an IPO for some time and has generally kept mum on the subject. However, despite an obvious reluctance to discuss the matter, there’s been a lot of hype around the subject over the past few months that began around last year’s IPO from Facebook.
On the other hand, the complete flop of the Facebook IPO has made tech companies afraid of going public.
On Wednesday, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg encouraged Twitter to go public and, despite his not being the best person to ask for advice on how to launch a flawless IPO, they should still do it.