Facebook Valued at Just Under $100 Billion

In a private market auction yesterday, Facebook was valued at $94 billion, which is squarely in the ballpark of the $100 billion valuation that financial pundits have been tossing around. Don't read much more into it than that; there's plenty of time for the valuation to change slightly before the actual IPO (sometime in May), and either way, it's not going to affect you in the slightest.

SharesPost Inc. completed an auction of 100,000 shares of Facebook’s Class B common stock, according to an e-mail obtained by Bloomberg News. The shares were sold for a clearing price of $40 each, valuing the company at $94 billion based on a fully diluted share count of about 2.35 billion, according to SharesPost.

Facebook filed this week to raise at least $5 billion in the largest Internet IPO on record. The Menlo Park, California- based company, with 845 million users worldwide, is considering a valuation of $75 billion to $100 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said last week. At the top of the range, Facebook would be the ninth-biggest U.S. technology company by market value.

A $100 billion market capitalization would value Facebook at 26.9 times trailing 12-month sales, more than double Google Inc.’s valuation when the search-engine operator went public in 2004. Revenue at Facebook jumped 88 percent last year to $3.71 billion, while net income climbed by almost two-thirds to $1 billion.

The valuation based on a per-share price of $40 may change depending on the actual share count after the IPO. As of Dec. 31, Facebook had 117.1 million Class A shares and 1.76 billion Class B shares outstanding. Additionally, there are about 380 million restricted stock units that vest at a later date, as well as other shares tied to options and compensation.