It's hard to believe the iconic social media juggernaut can command such admiration but get hammered as an IPO...and the punishment may not be over yet, writes Chris Preston of The Daily Profit.
Facebook (FB) shares dipped below $30 on Tuesday. The stock opened trading this Wednesday at $28.70 a share, three-quarters of its $38 IPO price.
To Facebook execs, it must seem like a lifetime ago that the company went public. In reality, it’s been less than two weeks. During that time, Facebook’s market cap has shrunk from $104 billion to $61.7 billion.
Not even maligned recent social media stocks Groupon (GRPN), Pandora (P), or Zynga (ZNGA) fell that far that fast after their failed IPOs. Unlike Facebook, none of those companies were profitable at the time they went public. (Facebook made a profit of $1 billion last year.) But according to some analysts, the stock is still too expensive.
Thomson Reuters StarMine projects that Facebook shares could eventually dip below $10, based on expected growth rates of 10.8% over the next decade. Our own Ian Wyatt says the stock is worth about $20.
So Facebook’s national nightmare may not be over yet. Regardless of what the company is actually worth, it’s still getting hammered from all the bad publicity stemming from underwriters’ failure to notify investors that they cut earnings forecasts prior to the company’s IPO.
That’s likely to continue for at least a few more days. As fast as they’ve fallen already, there’s still plenty of room for Facebook shares to sink even lower.
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