LinkedIn is going public on Thursday, May 19, becoming the first social media company to do so. It hopes to raise $274 million in capital. LinkedIn will be trading as LNKD and its shares are expected to trade between $32 to $35. 7.84 million shares will be available on Thursday and the company will likely be valued around $3 billion after the IPO. The company announced that LinkedIn is going public back in January, when its estimated value was just a paltry $2.5 billion. However, the business social media giant hit the 100 million user mark in March, and in the first quarter of 2011, it’s hit $93.9 million, a 110% increase from the year-ago period. Net income was $2 million, compared to $1.8 million in Q1 2010.
LinkedIn Is Going Public | About LinkedIn
LinkedIn is really a huge database of professionals for business professionals. Unlike other social networks, like Twitter, which lacks profile depth, or Facebook, which is all over the place demographically and is also hard to find people, Linkedin standardizes information entered by users into predefined “Profile Headline”, “Summary”, “Education”, “Company”, etc. categories. In addition to this huge database of information, LinkedIn provides an awesome search tool to allow you to pinpoint the person you are looking for depending on a number of very specific factors.
What do you think about the news that LinkedIn is going public on Thursday and are you willing to invest?