Twitter’s IPO Filing Shows 215 Million Monthly Active Users
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LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — In its IPO filing, Twitter revealed Thursday that it has more than 200 million monthly active users who tweet 500 million tweets per day.
Among the seemingly impressive financial figures revealed for the first time, the company wrote in its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, “From 2011 to 2012, revenue increased by 198 percent to $316.9 million.”
Meanwhile, its net loss decreased by 38 percent to $79.4 million, the filing states.
Twitter’s stock ticker symbol would be TWTR. The filing indicates Twitter hopes to raise up to $1 billion.
The company said the number of shares common stock that will be outstanding after this offering “is based on 472,613,753 shares of our common stock,” including preferred stock.
On Thursday afternoon, Twitter founders Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams, former CEO, gathered for a company all-staff meeting at its headquarters in San Francisco.
Those three people along with Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo are expected to make handsome profits from the company’s IPO.
Investors said the most important and revealing piece of information in the S-1 filing is how many users Twitter has.
On Sept. 12, Twitter announced via Tweet that it filed for an IPO, but the company is only now releasing the S-1 filing publicly as part of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act. The JOBS Act, signed into law in April 2012, permits companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenue to file a confidential S-1.
Companies that file for an IPO are required to show five years of historical financial data and three years of audited financial statements, but the JOBS Act allows emerging growth companies to provide just two years of both.
Santoush Rao, senior analyst and head of research at Greencrest Capital, said he wanted to know how much money the company is making now and how close they are to profitability.
Rao said even if Twitter is not profitable yet that doesn’t concern investors.
“Profitability is not a priority. Monetizing and revenue growth are what investors are interested in. Profitability will come later on,” he said.
Twitter’s main streams of advertising revenue are thought to be promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts.
The company writes that it could be an emerging growth company for up to five years following the completion of its IPO, meaning it could earn under $1 billion in revenue annually during those years.
“We will cease to be an emerging growth company upon the earliest of: (i) the end of the fiscal year following the fifth anniversary of this offering, (ii) the first fiscal year after our annual gross revenue are $1.0 billion or more,” the filing indicates.
One week ago, Twitter announced a deal with the National Football League that allows users to view NFL footage and news on the social media site in a move that will bring it another revenue stream.
Typically after a company files an S-1, there is a required “quiet period,” but under the JOBS Act, smaller companies can still meet with investors.
“The road show can happen super fast,” Rao said, with some companies even pricing their IPO within days and others in a longer time frame. In a road show, company officials go around to prospective major investors to drum up support for the share offer.
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