FX.co ★ Facebook announces secondary offering

Facebook is intending to issue more shares, as social network's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has decided recently. He is planning to sell his own holdings of 41.35 million shares. For majority of users, it is just another financial operation, but the stock market participants will see the first sale of the shares since the company's IPO early last year. Zuckerberg will exercise stock options to purchase 60 million Class B shares. After that, the Facebook stocks will be converted into Class A shares. These securities will be offered to the public. According to the social network, the profit of about $2.3 billion from this deal will be spent to meet the tax expenses arising from such trading operations. After the shares are sold, Mark Zuckerberg's stake will be only 56.1% instead of the current 58.8%. One more member of the Board of Directors Marc Anderssen is going to sell 1.65 million shares he controls. More than that, the shares owned by Facebook not by private shareholders will be sold as well. Initially, 27 million stocks will be traded on the stock exchange. Experts are estimating that the offering would raise about $3.9 billion. A part of this money will be used for “corporate needs”, the other one is planned to fund future purchases of smaller rivals. Let us look at statistics. Last week, Facebook shares were at the price of $54.09, and market cap was valued at $135.33 billion. The number of users for a month rose to 1.19 billion in 2013. Zuckerberg’s fortune is $19 billion, according to Forbes.