First look at Twitter’s IPO filing #twitteripo

SAN FRANCISCO -- Twitter made public its stealth filing for its hotly anticipated initial public stock offering Thursday.

The San Francisco company hopes to raise $1 billion when it begins selling shares to the public, according to the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is expected to move swiftly and probably will go public in early November. It plans to trade under the symbol TWTR.
With the filing, prospective investors got their first look under Twitter’s hood.

Twitter’s financials released Thursday showed the company made $253.6 million in the first half of 2013, up from $122.4 million in the same period last year.

The company saw torrential growth in 2012, when revenue shot up 198% to about $317 million.

But expenses soared along with revenue growth. Twitter lost $69.2 million in the first half of 2013, compared with a loss of $49.1 million a year earlier. It lost about $79 million in 2012.

“Since our inception, we have incurred significant operating losses, and, as of June 30, 2013, we had an accumulated deficit of $418.6 million,” Twitter said in its filing. “Although our revenue has grown rapidly, increasing from $28.3 million in 2010 to $316.9 million in 2012, we expect that our revenue growth rate will slow in the future as a result of a variety of factors, including the gradual slowdown in the growth rate of our user base.”

Research firm EMarketer pegged Twitter’s 2013 revenue at $582 million, up from $288 million last year.

The company said in its filing that it has 215 million monthly active users and that 100 million of those are daily active users. It also says it has 500 million tweets a day.

Chief Executive Dick Costolo owns 1.6% of the company. Co-founders Jack Dorsey owns 4.9% and Evan Williams owns 12%. Investor Peter Fenton owns 6.7%.

Costolo’s 2012 pay is valued at $11.5 million.

Twitter filed its IPO papers in July under a provision of the JOBS Act that lets companies with less than $1 billion in revenue do so confidentially. Under the law, Twitter is not required to release detailed financial information until 21 days before it begins marketing the offering to investors.

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