John Borkowski, May 18, 2011
Social Media firm LinkedIn plans their initial public offering (IPO) of common stock on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker: LNKD at tomorrow’s opening bell. The company will release tonight (Wednesday) in the after-market trading the official share price. Experts expect the price to be between $42-$45 per share. This concerns some investors, however, as the company has a slowing revenue growth and has not released projected profits for 2011. At the offering, however, the company will be valued at $4.11 billion.
So who’s buying and who’s selling? Goldman Sachs will reportedly sell their entire stake of 871,000 shares at the market open. This should drop the share price significantly at the onset. CEO Jeff Weiner stated that he is selling less than 10% of his holdings at the opening bell also.
The outcome of tomorrows IPO will set the tone for the social media market, as investors are eager for social media companies to go public. Facebook is expected to go public in April 2012, and has a present market value of around $70 billion.
Ken Wisnefski, founder and CEO of WebiMax, and an expert in job growth market, sees LinkedIn as a “valuable resource for candidates to network with other professionals, and use to their advantage in seeking employment and building their professional networks”.
Whether or not the market will buy in to the social media company, we won’t know until tomorrow at 4:30pm. Although it is hard to imagine $45 a share to be a stable platform for a company that is lagging in revenue, however investors are eager to take a bite out of the social media IPO market.
It will probably be a tug of war between investor excitement versus a company with not so impressive revenue growth.
