Pre-IPO Filing, Facebook Trading Privately At $84 Billion Valuation
Saturday, January 28, 2012 at 10:00AM Tech Crunch – Jan. 30, 2012
TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld utilizes auctions conducted on SharesPost to estimate Facebook’s worth. Based on these numbers, Schonfeld concludes that if Facebook went public today, it would get a valuation of approximately $85 billion.
“Facebook shares trade on private markets like SharesPost and SecondMarket. In fact, there is an auction going on right now on SharesPost for a block of Facebook shares which ends February 2 (the same day the filing is expected to hit). The last contract was yesterday at $35.50, which gives Facebook an implied valuation of $83.5 billion. The last auction on SharesPost closed at a ‘clearing price’ of $34 on January 20, which gave it an implied valuation of $80 billion.
SharesPost is an illiquid market with limited supply, so this is a very loose proxy. But it sets an important benchmark.”
Read the full story here.