NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO, (Reuters) – Twitter Inc shares rose 73 percent in a frenzied trading debut that drove the seven-year-old company’s value to $25 billion and evoked the heady days of the dot-com bubble.
The stock closed its first trading day at $44.90 a share from the initial public offering price of $26 set late on Wednesday, falling back from a near-doubling in price at a session high of $50.
Investor enthusiasm for the microblogging company defied traditional valuation analyses. The shares traded at about 22 times forecast 2014 sales, nearly double the multiple at social media rivals Facebook Inc and LinkedIn Corp, even though Twitter is far from turning a profit and posted a loss of almost $70 million for its most recent quarter.
Yet fans believe that Twitter, which has 230 million users globally, has established itself as an indispensable Internet utility, alongside Google Inc and Facebook, and that it has only scratched the surface of its potential as a global advertising medium.
“When people use Twitter they are following certain people, they’re searching for specific information,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “There are powerful marketing signals that are almost Google-esque, something that Facebook doesn’t really have.”
The IPO was shadowed for months by Facebook’s troubled 2012 debut, in which the shares quickly fell below their offering price amid trading glitches and subjected the company and its lead banker, Morgan Stanley, to accusations that they had been greedy in pricing the deal.
Twitter’s opening appeared to go off without a hitch, prompting Anthony Noto, the Goldman Sachs banker who led the IPO, to write a simple Tweet: “Phew.”
Still, Twitter may find itself subject to the opposite criticism, that it had priced the shares too low and left more than a billion dollars on the table.
