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Submission + - IPO Was Beginning of the End for Facebook (northmobilepost.com)

Submitted by
nmpost
nmpost writes: "Was going public a good idea for Facebook? Obviously, it made the founders and original investors a lot of money, but the long term prospects for the company are now in jeopardy. Take yesterday’s earnings report as an example. The company showed 32% revenue growth, earning $1.8 billion. The company showed a loss due to the costs of the IPO, but take that away and Facebook earned $295 million, or 12 cents a share. Despite those numbers, which met expectations, shares of the company tumbled after hours and were falling again today. Facebook is now at the mercy of Wall Street, where growth is not enough, and even meeting expectations will not satisfy investors. Each report that doesn’t show explosive growth that blows away analysts will be seen as a failure. With Facebook seemingly reaching a plateau in new users as it reaches market saturation, these types of earnings reports are going to be common."
Businesses

Submission + - Mark Zuckerberg's Big Facebook Mistake

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Nathan Vardi writes in Forbes that in the last two months, Mark Zuckerberg has had a rude introduction to the capital markets and with Facebook’s stock in free-fall, down more than 40% from its IPO price, Zuckerberg has a big problem. "Zuckerberg did not want to deal with the pressures of being a public company. Like many entrepreneurs these days he viewed the capital markets with suspicion," writes Vardi. "So Zuckerberg made a fateful decision, he decided to keep Facebook a privately-held company for much longer than other success stories like Google or Amazon." But waiting eight years to conduct an IPO has turned out to be an impossible problem to manage. The bankers at Morgan Stanley applied all the lessons of the last 15 years and priced the IPO at $38, which was very aggressive, in an attempt to avoid leaving any money on the table and the embarrassment that a huge IPO pop would represent. With such a big valuation at IPO time, Facebook had to show some results but the numbers that Facebook announced in its first quarterly earnings report were underwhelming and the trading hordes drove Facebook’s stock down by 15% in Friday morning trading. Now the early institutional investors are heading for the exits and it's hard to imagine morale at Facebook won’t take a hit that correlates with the loss in value of the shares belonging to the employees. "The lesson of the Facebook fiasco for Silicon Valley is clear. Start-up entrepreneurs cannot evade the discipline of the capital markets any more than can the prime ministers of Spain and Italy.""

Comment Re:Archaeological Geophysics (Score 1) 220

True, but on the back end you end up losing a lot of ass if you tell a hot chick you are a "Archaeological Geophysics". What's your pick up line going to sound like...."Baby, I could tell you were using your Ground Penetrating Radar to check me out...did you find anything hard you like?" I can't believe I just wrote that.....God help me.

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