Facebook plans to file the prospectus for its initial public offering on Wednesday, according to people briefed on the matter, finally kicking off one of the most anticipated stock sales of the social networking era.
The Internet giant plans to list a preliminary fund-raising goal of about $5 billion, one of these people said. Another cautioned that any such number was largely a placeholder for determining filing fees, and that the final amount could differ significantly. And the company could still decide to delay its filing.
Facebook is also expected to pick Morgan Stanley as the lead bank for the offering, putting it in the coveted “lead-left” position of the underwriters listing, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Morgan Stanley had dueled with Goldman Sachs for the prestige that comes with leading Facebook’s market debut. The two firms sit atop the league tables for I.P.O.’s held over the past 12 months, according to data from Thomson Reuters. Goldman is currently in the lead, having led 52 offerings that raised $11.8 billion. Morgan Stanley led 66 offerings that raised $10.1 billion.
But Facebook’s debut may reap smaller fees than are seen in normal offerings. Analysts at Freeman & Company estimated that the fees for the offering could be as low as 2.5 percent to 2.8 percent, roughly on par with what Google and Visa paid in their I.P.O.’s.
General Motors paid its underwriters even less — a remarkably low 0.75 percent — thanks in part to pressure from the auto maker’s principal shareholder, the Treasury Department.
A number of other banks are expected to round out the list of underwriters in the initial prospectus, with more added over time.
At $5 billion, the size of the offering is remarkably small, given speculation that Facebook could seek as much as $10 billion. But other Internet companies that have gone public in the last year, including Groupon and Zynga, initially sought small fund-raising amounts, only to raise those targets after gauging investor demand.
Should Facebook expand the size of the stock sale to that expected $10 billion, the I.P.O. will be the biggest technology offering in history, according to data from Thomson Reuters. The current record holder is Infineon Technologies’ debut, which raised nearly $5.9 billion in 2000.
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