Today is the day that investors find out what Facebook is made of when the company starts publicly trading. Facebook is offering 421,233,615 shares at $38 a pop and by all accounts has raised over $16 billion in funds for the company.
This amount is made up for $3.91 billion in cash holdings, a $5 billion credit line that was secured earlier this year and $6.84 billion from the sale of shares yesterday. This has secured Facebook the second spot for the best US IPO of all time, just behind Visa which managed $17.9 billion in 2008.
The company also outstrips the previous best by an internet-based company, surpassing Google’s $1.6 billion IPO by a considerable margin.
Facebook is still playing with comparatively small amounts of cash compared to Microsoft, Google and the other big players in the internet arena but analysts expect that the company will use what they have at their disposal to acquire other companies, staff, IPs and a new data center or two. If Mark Zuckerberg is to be believed though, we won’t be seeing another purchase like Instagram’s any time soon.
Source: Bloomberg