from All Facebook by Nick O’Neill
If you thought Facebook’s stock may be astronomically priced, a new report from the Telegraph suggests that you’d be right as the company is now trading at twice the value of Yahoo! The company is also valued at a quarter of Google which generates 24 times as much revenue as Facebook does every year. If Facebook’s revenue were to double every year from now until forever, Facebook would surpass Yahoo’s current revenue by the end of 2012 and would surpass Google’s revenue by the end of 2014. That would be an aggressive forecast, to say the least.
However how did Google get to the point where they were generating $24 billion a year? In the company’s 2004 annual report, Google released numbers going back to 2000. Based on all public figured, Facebook currently looks like Google did in 2003, projected to generate approximately the $1.465 billion that Google generated that year. By the end of the following year, 2004, Google generated over $3.18 billion and had performed a successful public offering, eventually valuing the company at around $60 billion by the end of the year.
That means Facebook’s valuation appears to be tracking Google’s valuation almost identically. Whether or not revenue growth can continue at the pace that Google is unknown, however if Facebook were to mimic Google’s past, the company should file to go public next year. So far Mark Zuckerberg has dismissed such notions and some have even reported that Facebook will most likely hold off until 2012. Whenever it takes place, Facebook appears to be on par with Google which means that Facebook is setting the stage for a massive IPO.