San Francisco: Good news for the Facebook fans is that the world’s leading social networking website will be appearing in the Stock Market from May with a record setting initial public offering of shares, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
The biggest online social network Facebook has closed selling shares on the secondary market in order to get a precise count of investors, the Journal said.
Facebook in February planned to go public and could raise as much as $10 billion in the largest flotation ever by an Internet company on Wall Street.
The official procedure filed for the initial public offering provided the first glimpse of the financial details of the website launched eight years ago by Mark Zuckerberg from his Harvard University dorm room.
Facebook reported net income of $668 million last year that was doubled to nearly $3.7 billion in 2011, with most of it coming from targeted advertising.
Facebook, the leading social network in all but six countries, notably China and Russia, said it has above 845 million users including 483 million who log in daily.
Facebook’s value has been estimated at between $75 billion and $100 billion.