With a hat tip to everyone in our Twitter stream, here’s a link to the S-1 and an excerpt from the announcement on the LinkedIn blog:
LinkedIn Corporation announced today that it has filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of its Class A common stock. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the offering have not yet been determined. A portion of the shares will be issued and sold by LinkedIn, and a portion will be sold by certain stockholders of LinkedIn.
The bookrunning managers of the proposed offering will be Morgan Stanley & Co. Incorporated, BofA Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC. Allen & Company LLC and UBS Securities LLC will be acting as co-managers.
All Things Digital had the scoop very early this morning, and Deal Journal rounds up a few data points from the filing.
LinkedIn was one of five social media companies on RenCap’s shadow backlog of potential IPOs, released in early January. The others were Groupon, Facebook, Oak Pacific Interactive, and Zynga. Oak Pacific has indicated that it might list in Hong Kong in the first half of 2011, and there’s a good chance that Groupon and Facebook will go public by the end of 2012.
LinkedIn is thus the first of this group to graduate from secondary market hype to IPO filing. As for whether its public valuation will approach its rumoured $3bn valuation on sites such as Sharepost and Secondmarket — a quote from the filing suggests that patience may be required (HT Techcrunch):
“We expect our revenue growth rate to decline, and as we continue to invest for future growth, we do not expect to be profitable on a GAAP basis in 2011.”
Net revenue was $161m in the first nine months of 2010, compared to $81m in 2009. But net income in those three quarters was just $10m.
At the end of 2009, analysts predicted a wave of big internet IPO filings in 2010. They had to settle for Skype and Demand Media (and a healthy assortment of smaller players).
But as we wrote previously, things are a bit different now and it wasn’t unreasonable to make the same call again this year.
Related link:
Something familiar about this IPO preview – FT Alphaville
Is Skype the one? – FT Alphaville
Could Facebook save California – Bloomberg
Primary concerns with secondary markets – FT Alphaville