It has been a little over an year since Facebook decided to go public. After its IPO last year, the company’s stock price dipped which took quite a while to recover. These things happen in the course of running a public company, and so do secondary stock offerings. Facebook has announced today that it is going to offer nearly 70 million shares, which would raise about $4 billion. Facebook will also be joining the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.
The company itself is going to offer 27,004,761 shares of Class A common stock whereas “certain selling stockholders” are going to offer the rest, which include co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg as well, with 41,350,000 shares. The actual price of these shares is going to be determined at the market’s close today, December 19th. Facebook will be added to S&P 500 at the close of trading tomorrow, getting on this index means that there’s now a measure to view its influence on the wider financial market. Facebook hasn’t provided any details about what its going to spend the roughly $4 billion it raises on, but it does say that the money may be used for “acquisitions of complementary business, technologies or assets.” Only recently it was rumored that Facebook was interested in acquiring Snapchat, bidding a phenomenal $3 billion for it. So even if Snapchat doesn’t sell, with that kind of money, Facebook will be in a position to pick up a number of other companies.
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