Preço das casas dá maior salto de sempre no arranque da garantia pública

[atomez]

LinkedIn prices IPO at $45 a share

LinkedIn's initial public offering priced at $45 a share Wednesday.

Shares of the social networking service for professionals will begin trading Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol LNKD.

The 8-year-old company will make its stock market debut with a value of $4.3 billion as investors clamor to get a piece of the most hotly anticipated IPO out of Silicon Valley in years and the biggest from a U.S. Internet company since Google set the gold standard nearly seven years ago when it went public.

In fact, its bankers boosted its price range this week, adding about $1 billion to LinkedIn's value.

Most analysts expect shares to rise Thursday.

Few Internet companies have tested the public waters since the dot-com crash. LinkedIn's lofty valuation -- some 20 times its 2010 revenue -- already has invited comparisons to the heyday of the last boom.

But the market's appetite for social networking companies, pent up for so long, seems to be running strong. And LinkedIn, which connects more than 100 million professionals online, has three revenue streams: online ads, premium subscriptions and hiring tools for recruiters.

LinkedIn's performance will be closely watched as a harbinger for other sought-after companies in the space such as Facebook, Groupon, Twitter and Zynga.

It will also mesmerize entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley who have seen private market valuations of social networking companies soar but have no clue what their businesses are worth in the public markets.

The IPO will also mark a big payday for LinkedIn's co-founder and chairman Reid Hoffman who, as an investor and an entrepreneur, has placed bold bets on and helped shape the Internet's hottest sector.

Hoffman has a 20% stake in the company which this time Thursday will be worth $858 million. For more on Hoffman, check out this profile.

Chief Executive Jeff Weiner will also be in the money: His 2.5% stake is worth roughly $105 million.

[atomez]

Social-networking chega às Bolsas.

IPO da Linkedin na 5ª feira, 19/5.

LinkedIn slated for IPO debut this week

Success of offering may be harbinger for other social-network deals

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — LinkedIn Corp., the online professional-networking service seen as a bellwether among a crop of promising Internet firms now moving to the public markets, is expected to make its IPO debut on Thursday.

LinkedIn is currently planning to price its offering of 7.8 million shares between $32 and $35 a share, which will give the Mountain View, Calif.-based company a valuation between $3 billion and $3.3 billion. The stock is expected to launch on the New York Stock Exchange, under the ticker “LNKD.”

The offering has been anticipated since it’s the first among a batch of relatively mature, high-profile Internet firms to attempt to go public.

Others expected to reach the public markets later this year or early in the next include Facebook Inc., daily-deals service Groupon Inc. and social-gaming firm Zynga Inc.

Scott Sweet of IPO Boutique called LinkedIn “the first of what is likely the start of several true U.S. social-networking firms to come public.” Chinese social network Renren RENN -3.95% debuted on May 4 at $14 per share, but has since slipped below its offering price.

“[LinkedIn] will certainly act as a barometer and guide others that are contemplating doing the same … as to price points,” Sweet wrote in a note Sunday. He added that demand for the LinkedIn IPO appears to be “extremely strong.”

Some investors already have had a chance to trade in the company’s shares. Secondary markets, thanks to venues such as SharesPost and SecondMarket, increasingly have become a popular means for insiders at private technology firms to cash in prior to an IPO.

Shares of LinkedIn have been quoted on SharesPost at prices ranging from $8.75 in September 2009 to nearly $31 as recently as March — creating the possibility that some pre-IPO investors could make out handsomely following the offering, while others may end up under water, depending on the public demand.

“We cannot assure you that the price of our Class A common stock will equal or exceed the price at which our securities have traded on these private secondary markets,” LinkedIn has advised in regulatory filings.

In its filings with the Security and Exchange Commission, LinkedIn says its revenue rose to $243 million last year from $120.1 million in 2009 — while the company swung to net income of $3.4 million, from a net loss of $4 million the prior year.

The company says that as of March 31, it held more than $106 million in cash and equivalents, and had more than 100 million members, compared with some 64 million a year earlier.

While LinkedIn is often compared to Facebook because of the companies’ shared focus on social networking, the two operate at a largely different scale. Facebook has more than 600 million users, and was valued at roughly $50 billion as part of a funding round closed in January.

The two companies also have very different sources of revenue. LinkedIn draws most of its money from selling recruiting and marketing services to businesses, as well as premium services paid for by subscribers. LinkedIn has said that last year, more than 33,000 customers used its “marketing solutions,” while its “hiring solutions” were used by nearly 3,900 companies.

Facebook is believed to generate most of its revenue through advertising as well as a share of transactions for games and other services through its platform.

While financial data for still-private firms is hard to come by, limited numbers disclosed by Facebook as it raised its last round of funding indicated that it had more than $1 billion in cash and equivalents on hand as of last year, and that its revenue rose nearly 180% in the first nine months of 2010, to about $1.2 billion.

Research firm eMarketer estimated last month that Facebook will pull in $4.05 billion in advertising revenue this year.

Dual-class share structure

One similarity between LinkedIn and Facebook, however, is a dual-class structure for the companies’ stock. That structure endows LinkedIn’s founders and early investors with more influence over the company’s strategic decisions, such as mergers or the sale of assets.

Following the IPO, LinkedIn founders and early investors will hold Class B shares, which entail 10 stockholder votes per share, as opposed to the Class A shares distributed to the public, which have one vote per share. LinkedIn’s co-founder and executive chairman, Reid Hoffman, will hold Class B stock following the IPO that represents roughly 21.7% of the voting power of the company’s outstanding stock, according to public filings.

The dual-class structure “may have the effect of deterring hostile takeovers or delaying changes in our control or management,” LinkedIn has advised potential investors in filings.

Facebook adopted a dual-class stock structure in 2009, because “existing shareholders wanted to maintain control over voting on certain issues,” the company said at the time.

LinkedIn and Facebook are not the first Internet firms to deploy a dual-stock structure. Google Inc. GOOG -0.34% adopted a dual-class structure before it went public in 2004.

[Elias]

LinkedIn redefine encaixe com entrada em bolsa
10 de Maio de 2011
tek.sapo.pt

A entrada em bolsa do LinkedIn vai concretizar-se com a emissão de 7,87 milhões de acções, pelo preço de 32 a 35 dólares por título, dando origem a um encaixe entre os 251 milhões a 274 milhões de dólares (175 a 191 milhões de euros).

Os valores da Oferta Pública Inicial (OPI ) foram divulgados pelos responsáveis da rede de contactos profissionais e estão substancialmente acima do anunciado em Janeiro, quando a empresa disse esperar encaixar 175 milhões de dólares.

A entrada em Wall Street, suportada pelas instituições financeiras Morgan Stanley, BofA Merrill Lynch e JPMorgan Securities, no entanto continua sem calendário definido.

Os actuais accionistas da empresa deverão ceder 3,01 milhões de títulos suplementares, esperando encaixar cerca de 96 a 105 milhões de dólares (67 milhões a 122 milhões de euros), enquanto o LinkedIn deverá vender quase cinco milhões de acções.

O LinkedIn nasceu há sete anos e conta actualmente com 100 milhões de utilizadores activos na sua rede social.

Mais de metade dos utilizadores do serviço já provêm de fora dos Estados Unidos, sendo que o Linkedin é actualmente usado em mais de 200 países. De acordo com os últimos dados oficiais, junta-se à plataforma um novo membro a cada segundo.

[carf2007]

Eles tem que colocar enquanto estão na ribalta, porque já amanhã pode surgir um "novo facebook" e este já era.

[Elias]

LinkedIn: IPO Will Place Company at Strategic Crossroads
by: IPO Candy February 27, 2011 | about: LNKD

LinkedIn (LNKD) has been rescued by the Twitter/Facebook phenomenon and is now positioned as the ”professional” networking leader.

The company was started in the horse-and-buggy days of online networking way back in 2003. The first value proposition that stuck with users was the notion that having a professional profile on record made sense, and being able to link with other professionals would be desirable. So, many people found it worth their time to create a free profile and the company grew.

At the end of the first year they reached 500,000 users. By the end of 2004 they reached 1.6m members, then 4m at the end of 2005, and 9m by the end of 2007. Even as the company reached 33m members at the end of 2008 there were some bumps in the road as the credit crisis and economic turmoil forced the company to lay off employees, change their CEO and do some soul searching.

That difficult period has left some scars on the company in terms of both strategy and execution. The success of Facebook begged the question whether LinkedIn should be a ”Facebook for businesses” or remain more of a professional network. At the same time, Twitter was growing rapidly among technologists and consumers. Under the current CEO the company has basically focused on where the money is, which is in recruiting, advertising and premium services. Since then member growth, revenues and profitability have been excellent.

Where does LinkedIn go from here? In the short term their strategy should work well as the economy and the job market continue to recover. More and more members will want premium services and more companies will be spending on corporate, recruiting and marketing services. Longer term though they may have some more soul searching to do.

For example, although LinkedIn now integrates with Twitter it doesn’t really have a use. Twitter sits in the middle of the personal and business world so having your tweet stream display inside LinkedIn doesn’t have a clear value. Dedicated services such as Yammer and the new Chatter product from Salesforce.com are the tools business users are adopting for this style of collaboration when people are actually working together.

Another challenge LinkedIn still has to address is their mission to provide ”expert insights and knowledge”. So far they have attempted to tackle this with LinkedIn Answers and LinkedIn Groups. Providing these tools has been fairly unrewarding. It may be that the mixture of information along with promotion and advertising just has not worked. In contrast an upstart called Quora has emerged to be an interesting example of what might work in this domain. However, Quora is still blessed with not having a business model and they too will have to figure out how to make this work within the context of making money.

Post IPO, LinkedIn will stand at a strategic crossroads. Will they plunge deeper into expert networks and knowledge sharing? Will they focus instead on corporate information and more B2B services? Their mission has been to focus on members but in the past two years that has certainly become fuzzy as corporations and advertisers have become the majority revenue source.

There’s also the entire collaboration space, which is already large and growing. This results in linking professionals for actions, projects, efforts, and day to day tasks. Collaboration is a more fluid type of application mode and much of what LinkedIn offers is static or more batch oriented. This works for job recruiting but not so well for projects, virtual organizations, and the rapid assembly of high-performance teams.

Another issue facing LinkedIn is the ”forking” of professional communities over to their own sites. For example Stackoverflow is becoming the place for many programming types to share ”expert insights” and build their profiles based on what they know and can do. Most recruiters agree that it’s way better than an online resume. We see more of these emerging in specialized communities. That could leave LinkedIn to become the place of choice for only a portion of professionals.

In the short term LinkedIn should be a solid IPO given their 80 percent growth and 20 percent (EBITDA) operating margins. The preliminary Intrinsic Value in our report suggests a valuation of $2.6B to $2.9B. After the final prospectus is available and the company begins marketing we will update the report and add to the IV and peer analysis sections with a more detailed business model.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/255218- ... crossroads

[Ulisses Pereira]

A questão é mesmo essa, é a de saber se as expectativas estão hoje no pico ou não... Por exemplo, em 2000, muitas empresas "dot coms" foram colocadas em Bolsa por valores idiotas (de tão excessivos que eram) e depois cairam 99%... Foi uma grande venda.

As OPV´s de hoje são feitas com base nos valores que acham que a empresa vai valer nos próximos anos. A questão é saber se as expectativas estão abaixo ou acima do que virá a ser a realidade.

Por exemplo, na minha opinião altamente empírica e pouco conhecedora, se eu fosse dono do Twitter, colocava-o já em Bolsa. Duvido que todas as estimativas que estão feita em torno dele se confirme e acho que é um fenómeno que tem tendência a implodir.

Por exemplo, em 2000 havia um site que se chamava bolsapt.com. Basicamente era o maior fórum de Bolsa de então. O seu dono recebeu uma proposta de venda de 1 milhão de euros. Recusou. Parecia que ia valer milhões... Dá pena ir lá hoje e não ter ninguém praticamente...

Ou seja, se achas que a tendência é de maior explosão, fazes bem em não fazeres OPV. Mas, pelo sim pelo não, colocar uma parte em Bolsa não me parece má ideia. Aliás, o próprio Facebook está a fazer isso de outra forma...

Um abraço,
Ulisses

[Muhammad3010]

Concordo com ambos! Mas será que estas empresas precisam de dinheiro já para continuar a trabalhar nessas ideias? Se é expectável que a linkedin valha 4 biliões em 2012 por exemplo (sem necessidade de aumento de capital/dispersão de capital em bolsa) porque é que vamos aumentar/dispersar já, se nessa altura a entrada de capitais seria maior? De que forma saber quando uma empresa está madura pra ser cotada? Quando tem falta de credores? Quando está muito endividada mas a ideia é boa (Twitter)?

Muhammad

[atomez]

Segue-se a Groupon Creio que este tipo de empresas tem um potencial de lucro bastante elevado e nada exagerado no caso da Linkedin, de todo o modo não entendo muito a necessidade de estarem cotadas em bolsa, parece que é o tapete da fama...

Isso, e a maneira de monetizar uma boa ideia...

[Ulisses Pereira]

Muhamad, não é o tapete da fama, mas é a segurança de muitos milhões assegurados... É quase como um seguro.

Um abraço,
Ulisses

[Muhammad3010]

Segue-se a Groupon Creio que este tipo de empresas tem um potencial de lucro bastante elevado e nada exagerado no caso da Linkedin, de todo o modo não entendo muito a necessidade de estarem cotadas em bolsa, parece que é o tapete da fama...

[HappyGuy]

Permite-me discordar do "caída em desuso".
Recebo 2 a 3 convites por mês para entrevistas de recrutamento, através do LinkedIn. O meu emprego actual derivou de um primeiro contacto através do LinkedIn.

Pelo menos na área de TI em Portugal, o LinkedIn não me parece nada estar em desuso...

[atomez]

Curioso, esta foi uma das primeiras redes "social networking" (ou será "social notworking"?) orientada a fins profissionais e parecia um bocado caída em desuso.

Será isto o início da bolha do social networking?

[Elias]

LinkedIn deverá pedir para entrar em bolsa ainda hoje
27 Janeiro 2011 | 20:21
Jornal de Negócios Online - negocios@negocios.pt

A rede social de profissionais Linkedin deverá pedir à Securities and Exchange Commission para fazer uma Oferta Pública Incial (IPO) ainda hoje, disseram fontes ligadas ao processo à Bloomberg.
A rede social de profissionais Linkedin já tinha dito estar a estudar a possibilidade de avançar este ano para a bolsa.

De acordo com a agência, o Morgan Stanley,o Bank of America e o JPMorgan são alguns dos bancos a colocar o Linkedin em bolsa.

A empresa está avaliada em 2,5 mil milhões de dólares na SharesPost, uma bolsa de acções de empresas privadas.