Twitter publicly released its SEC S-1 form filing Thursday, Oct. 3, 2013. A quick review of the S-1 does show Twitter's valuation at exactly $1 billion - with an attendant filing fee of $128,000.00. The filing is still in it's proprietary stage - so investors may want to consider their options during the 3 week "market tour". Some commentators and investors might suggest that this IPO may be badly timed in light of the U. S. Government shutdown. Is it double jeopardy for this IPO if it goes the same way as the Facebook IPO/NASDAQ debacle?
The last link (above) goes back to a rather good summation of the FB/IPO issues between Pimm Fox and Quinten Stevens in 2012. Will (or can?) Twitter heed this advice - and is it even necessary? Not only did Mr. Stevens have issues with the technical problems of the FB/IPO - "slow reporting". He also had issues with the types of investors and reporting to those - the institutional versus the retail investor. It seems likely that in a Twitter/IPO the retail investors may not get the needed reporting and guidance.
Other issues Mr. Stevens cited with the FB/IPO were: "Aggressive valuation", "problem with large price" and "NASDAQ issues". One hopes that Twitter can avoid these pitfalls - but the Twitter valuation may step aside that valuation question. The Facebook SEC S-1 (2012) did/does indicate a valuation of $5 billion - but that could have been changed. But does an open platform SMS-version that works globally from a variety of devices have real dollar value? That has to be a yes. It's different from the Twitter Prospectus but the micro-blogging service has about "500 million active users"!
According to a Bloomberg Business Week article of Oct. 3, 2013 Twitter is about "75% mobile" - so you know the carriers are making money off of tweets. And estimate the ad clicks (mobile and other devices) at about 50% for all? Applying the Twitter S-1 blue-lined revenue (for this year, this may be inaccurate) at about a "quarter of a billion dollars/6 months" that seems rather small - and Twitter is still bleeding cash. But Twitter, unlike FB, is the "original mobile platform" limited to 140 characters/post. Rumors say Twitter has plans to up that characters/post limit. If so, would that actually reflect a decline in the current valuation - which may be too low - of the Twitter SEC S-1 prior to its IPO?
