Facebook will go public tomorrow at $38 a share, valuing the social network company at more than $100B. That will make it the biggest Internet IPO ever — and one of the toughest stocks to analyze. Fans see it as the opportunity of a lifetime to own of piece of company that’s becoming central to the world’s digital future. Critics warn that Facebook’s shrewd owners and bankers aren’t doing anybody a favor: Buyers could discover that they’ve been caught up in a faith-based craze over a young company that lacks a track record of strong earnings, or even a clear strategy for consistent profit growth. What to do? Here are some arguments to consider:
Bulls: Facebook is a revolutionary service with a bright future. The social network had 526M daily active users at the end of March, +41% over 12 months. That should continue: Web usage is still on the rise around the globe, and about 48% of users are on Facebook. The penetration rate also should grow; the rate in the U.S. is 66%. Just imagine what Facebook can do when it cracks into China. It’s a solid business: Once people start to use Facebook, they’re hooked. It takes time to build up a network of friends, and nobody else can offer connections to nearly as many people. Facebook has 901M monthly active users, 3.2B likes and comments a day, 300M photo uploads per day, and 125B friendships. Also, buy now because the stock price is going to go out of sight once it becomes clear that Facebook knows how to make money. Social network advertising is in its infancy. Even so, companies are salivating at the opportunities they see to connect directly with strong prospects. Facebook “is able to provide target audience to advertisers with 90% to 95% accuracy given that users’ identity on FB is mostly authentic (5% to 6% of accounts are estimated to be fake/duplicates),” says Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia. “This is significantly higher than the industry average of 30%.” Mobile advertising also will be huge. Facebook just started to put ads in mobile News Feeds in March.
Bears: Stay away from this madness. The numbers are reason enough to worry: Facebook generated $205M in net income in Q1, down 12% vs the same period last year, on revenues of $1.1B, up 44.7%. The company’s past growth is fine but it will be tough to continue that pace. As for China: What makes you think that Facebook will find it easier than Google or Amazon did to win licenses from officials at the Ministry of Culture, the General Administration of Press and Publication, and the Ministry of Information? The advertising picture also is complicated. General Motors just decided to stop spending $10M on Facebook ads. If Facebook gets serious about loading its pages with ads, then we’ll see whether Facebook users stay loyal. Remember MySpace. Competition is intensifying from rivals including Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr. That’s just in the U.S. — there are a lot more rivals overseas. And don’t bet that the 27-year-old CEO Mark Zuckerberg will look out for shareholder interests. He will control 55.8% of the company’s votes, and clearly warns in the Facebook prospectus that “we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services…These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.”

They are two to three years late on this IPO think how smart it would have been for them to go public when they only had 400 million users. Or 500 million last year when Social Network was getting lots of pre-release buzz. They are now very close to maximum number of possible users they’ll reach one billion users but that’s the upper limit.
If you want to buy it wait until it pulls back at least 50% from whatever high it hits on Monday probably will rocket up to $90 or even $110 on Friday. Monday could see it hit $130 but by next Wednesday or Thursday it will pull back to $60 or $70 and level off or dip slightly lower to $50 and that’s when you should buy it.
as opposed to buying now and selling at 2x or 3x investment? the big houses are going to drive this stock thru the roof for their blue chip clients to make 3x or more on investment in a few days. then they’ll dump it high and we’ll see how low it goes.
so how wrong were you? very wrong.
its all speculation. only buy if you are ready for the possibility of losing alot.
please, that is like telling people to never buy ANY shares. every investment comes with the rik of losing everything, including facebook.
GM is also f’n broke. There is no reason to be shy about buying Facebook right now. The price will go up. There are virtually no IPO’s that break out as huge as this one is going to and then tanks a day later.
Drop $5000 into it tomorrow if you can and sell by next Friday and I will bet just about anything that you will be up to about $7500 in value easy.
Will it succeed long term? Who knows. I don’t see it going the way of myspace though. Myspace basically made you feel ‘isolated’ on your page. People got a little sick of ‘talking to themselves’ and also lets not forget how much they let you muck with code. I think we all remember the first time a friends page gave us malware from the crappy template they used. Facebook offers an experience that feels like you are more a part of a conversation with those you are friends with.
Also the games on Facebook took over right away. Myspace was far too late to the game with that as well.
Finally, it is everywhere unlike myspace was. You literally can’t get a smartphone without Facebook and everyone uses it. You had to badger people to sign up for myspace so you could share crap with them. However, with Facebook everyone looks on in stunned silence if they don’t have a FB account.
Oh and twitter, tumblr, pinterest all provide different services…and are largely dependent on ‘Facebook Connect’ to fully work. Google+ is not moving the needle at all at the moment. There are people murmuring that Google is about to pull the plug on it. Really, how many people do you know who actively use G+? I have an account and only use it to auto upload photos from my phone with…that I then go share on Facebook.
Where did the analyst come up with the figure that 5% to 6% of accounts are inauthentic on Facebook? This certainly doesn’t make my own (admittedly anecdotal) observations — I would have said closer to 35%-40% fake. I wonder how the analyst arrived at his numbers.
Considering the massive selloff that’s sure to follow, no, you probably shouldn’t unless you’re a huge fan of poverty.
I’ve gotten three emails in the last two days from the two firms I invest with essentially telling me to avoid it like the plague, and my gut tells me the same.
Zuck has pushed in circles to not go public. His investors, Goldman and a few others put the screws to him. They are way to leveraged and it was now or never. They will all dump their shares end of day tomorrow. I see this stock trading at 18 end of next week.
If it’s 18 a week from now I’m buying 1,000 shares.
More likely it will be at 58 a week from now.
“If it’s 18 a week from now I’m buying 1,000 shares.”
Brilliant reasoning. Got your checkbook out?
Bye bye FB pinterest is here now.
Any business school prof would tell you to run far away from this IPO.
Reading stock advice on Deadline is like reading movie reviews on Yahoo! Finance.
Any business school prof who knows anything about investing is no longer a business school prof.
Facebook is now basically women talking about their pets and children. It’s a giant echo chamber with nobody really listening. Every workplace should block the hell out of it. The code is an absolute mess and as mentioned its real growth is behind it. Facebook is the AOL of the new century. They should merge with some big media company for lols.
One upside: I have several fake accounts on Facebook that I use to troll news sites that integrate with it. Since everyone assumes Facebook accounts are real they seldom moderate or control such comments.
I still don’t think that GM pulling their ads from Facebook will make any difference .. a big part of advertising is exposure over the long run, even if it is subtle