Facebook has announced its IPO plans on Wednesday and with it open the doors for the first time for the general public to see how the social networking site works, and revealing some of the juicier stats it has been hiding up until now.
Those looking to invest will no doubt be interested to hear that Zuckerberg's company is looking for around $5bn of investment from the sale of shares which should still value the company at the incredibly high $100bn figure that has been floated around by those that are interested.
"Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission - to make the world more open and connected," says Mark Zuckerberg in the filing.
Still it didn't stop Facebook earning $3.7bn in revenue in 2011 up from $1.9bn in 2010 giving Facebook profits of $1bn in 2011 and meaning it has around $3.9bn in the bank according to the paperwork.
Zuckerberg, the company's 27-year-old CEO and Chairman, will retain the most stock (28.4 per cent) and in a similar stock deal to Google the biggest voting power as the stocks he owns are better than the stocks any individual can buy.
The filing also showed that Mark Zuckerberg currently earns $500,000 a year plus bonus, plus almost $700 spent on chartering planes for himself, friends, and family. That mammoth salary isn't set to last however. It has been suggested by him and agreed by the board that his salary in 2013 will drop to just a $1, presumably off the back of the massive amount of money (he will be worth around $28bn) that he will earn from the sale of shares in the IPO.
But it is the company's reliance on Zynga that is most surprising. Zynga accounts for a whopping 12 per cent of the company's revenue in 2011.
"In 2011, Zynga accounted for approximately 12% of our revenue, which amount was comprised of revenue derived from payments processing fees related to Zynga’s sales of virtual goods and from direct advertising purchased by Zynga. Additionally, Zynga’s apps generate a significant number of pages on which we display ads from other advertisers. If the use of Zynga games on our Platform declines, if Zynga launches games on or migrates games to competing platforms, or if we fail to maintain good relations with Zynga, we may lose Zynga as a significant Platform developer and our financial results may be adversely affected," says Facebook in the documents it has filed as part of the Initial Public Offering.
That's great news for Zynga, and possibly bad news for Facebook. What is clearer now though, is how many people are actively using the social network and how often.
According to the filing, there are now more than 845m monthly active users (MAU) of Facebook up 39 per cent on the December figures from 2010. Europe is the biggest Facebook user it seems with the country breaking being: 179 million MAU in the USA, 229m in Europe, 212m in Asia and 225m for the Rest of World.
That translates to 483 million people signing into the service every day, although Facebook is keen to point out that some of those might not be real unique people, but mobile apps autonomously checking in on their own, or even people with more than two Facebook accounts.
Still of those 845m, over half (425m) used Facebook mobile products and all 845m press that Like button or use Facebook Comments over 2.7bn times a day.
The stocks and therefore the chance to buy a piece of Facebook will go on sale later this year in June.
Pic: (CC) JD Lasica, socialmedia.biz
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