Twitter IPO: Shares priced between $17 and $20, for evaluation of $11 bn

San Francisco: Twitteris seeking a maximum valuation of $10.9 billion in its Wall Street debut, more modest than the $15 billion that some analysts had expected for the social media phenomenon.

Twitter said that it intends to sell 70 million shares priced between $17 and $20 in its hotly anticipated IPO. The company hopes to raise between $1.25 billion and $1.44 billion, according to an amended version of its prospectus filed on Thursday.

Twitter said on Thursday that there will be 544,696,816 shares of its common stock outstanding after the offering.

[caption id=“attachment_1192911” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Twitter said that it intends to sell 70 million shares priced between $17 and $20 in its hotly anticipated IPO. Reuters[/caption]

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“It’s conservative and likely going to be raised as they start the road show at least once if not twice,” Sam Hamadeh of PrivCo, a private company research firm, said of Twitter’s pricing.

“The size of the offering is also a bit small,” he added. “But they may only choose to raise the price once they gauge investor demand. Raising both the price and the size was Facebook’s fatal mistake.”

Twitter’s offering is the most high-profile Internet IPO since Facebook Inc’s rocky debut in May 2012, in which the company’s shares fell below their offering price in the ensuing days.

Twitter is expected to begin its pre-IPO road show next week as it gears up for an offering expected in November.

Twitter, which has roughly 230 million active users, has said it plans to list its stock under the “TWTR” symbol on the New York Stock Exchange.

The eight-year-old company more than doubled its third-quarter revenue to $168.6 million, but net losses widened to $64.6 million in the September quarter.

Reuters