With a simple tweet, social media giant Twitter announced it has filed for an initial public offering. In doing so, the microblogging site becomes the biggest high profile tech to go public since Facebook.
Adhering to its own policy, San Francisco-based Twitter kept its announcement under 140 characters:
We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.
-- Twitter (@twitter) September 12, 2013
No details of the IPO are known since Twitter filed S-1 papers to the SEC under the JOBS (Jumpstart Out Business Startups) Act, which allows companies to submit IPO documents privately if revenues are under $1 billion a year.
Without an official press release or other information available, investors will have to wait to determine the IPO date, the number of shares offered and initial pricing. However, many investment firms will be cautious in light of Facebook’s disastrous IPO in May 2012. Yet since then, Facebook has been on the upswing, surging to its all time high yesterday. And financial analysts remain bullish on the world’s leading social media platform, with a strong buy recommendation, in part to the mobile ad growth in future months.
Since its inception seven years ago, Twitter has grown into one of the world’s largest social media platforms and now has over 500 million total users and more than 200 million active users tweeting an average of 400 million tweets per day.
According to Forbes, Twitter has a market valuation of about $10 billion, well under Facebook’s valuation of an estimated $100 billion when it went public. Nevertheless, with today’s highly anticipated announcement, investors will be anxiously watching for complete details of the IPO.
