Facebook stock news plunge
Facebook Inc. (FB) has lost about $34 billion in market value since its May initial public offering, as the operator of the world’s largest social-networking service fails to assuage concerns about how it can make more money from almost a billion users.
Facebook’s stock dropped 12 percent yesterday, its biggest one-day loss on record, after its first quarterly earnings report as a public company. That brought the plunge to 38 percent since the May 17 debut, which at $16 billion was the largest ever for a technology company. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune plunged to $12.1 billion yesterday from $13.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
“Investors were always paying for potential for Facebook,” saidAaron Kessler, an analyst at Raymond James & Associates inSan Francisco, who has a market perform rating on the stock. “Clearly, today people are willing to pay less for that potential, which may be a few years out still.”
Of the largest IPOs on record, no other company has lost so much value so quickly, data compiled by Bloomberg show.General Motors Co. (GM) raised $18.1 billion after expanding its November 2010 offering and gained value in the comparable period, as did Visa Inc. (V), which generated $19.7 billion when it listed in 2008.
The decline of $34 billion is more than many companies’ total market value, including Whole Foods Market Inc. and Time Warner Cable Inc. That’s based on a share count of 2.4 billion.
