Twitter's IPO Filing Shows 215 Million Monthly Active Users
Twitter revealed its IPO filing, leaving investors' tongues wagging.
Oct. 3, 2013 — -- In its IPO filing, Twitter revealed today that it has more than 200 million monthly active users who tweet 500 million tweets per day.
Among the 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 of our common stock that will be outstanding after this offering "is based on 472,613,753 shares of our common stock," including preferred stock.
Read More: Twitter's IPO Filing Explained in 40 Tweets
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. The founders and Twitter's CEO Dick Costolo are expected to make handsome profits from the company's IPO.
Dorsey, named as chairman of the board, has a 4.9 percent stake in the company before the offering, the filing states, while Williams owns 12 percent and Costolo owns 1.6 percent. Investor Peter Fenton owns 6.7 percent in the company. Williams and Fenton are named as directors of the board.
In the filing, the company says, "Twitter was born on March 21, 2006 with just 24 characters." Dorsey's first tweet was: "just setting up my twttr."
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.
Read More: Twitter Announces It Filed For IPO Via Tweet
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.
Before the IPO filing was released, Rao said he did not believe Twitter was profitable yet though if they are, "it's probably very, very minimal," he said. But that doesn't concern investors, Rao said.
"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, meaning it could earn under $1 billion in revenue, for up to five years following the completion of its IPO.
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