US Edition • Shares end first day of trading flat at $38.23
• Early jitters see price fall back to IPO price
• Shares priced at $38, valuing the company at $104bn
• Zuckerberg rings the bell to begin Nasdaq trading
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21.44 That's the end of tonight's live coverage. If you bought Facebook shares today, I hope you bought at the right price. Trading resumes on Monday.
Enjoy the weekend. Goodnight.
21.28 While the Telegraph's Questor editor Garry White tweets:
Garry will offer his thoughts on Facebook in this Sunday's Questor.
21.26 US business editor Richard Blackden comments on Facebook's lacklustre debut:
So Facebook shares have closed up - but only just. The 0.2pc gain was not what Facebook's army of advisers were plotting for the company's debut. There will no doubt be recrimination and finger-pointing as to why Facebook did not enjoy the sharp increase enjoyed by other social media companies that have floated over the last 12 months.
A penny for Mark Zuckerberg's thoughts at the moment. Going public has never been the 28-year old's main aim so perhaps he may not be too concerned. At the company's outdoor gathering this morning at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, he reminded his employees that "going public is a significant milestone in our history, but here is the thing, our mission isn't to be a public company but to make the world more connected."
21.08 A record 566m Facebook shares were traded on its debut today, easily surpassing the previous record held by General Motors of 458m shares.
21.01
Ding ding! The closing bell has sounded out on Wall Street. The shares have closed at $38.23.
20.57 Max Wolff, senior analyst at Greencrest Capital, compared Facebook's debut to a "starlet tripping on the red carpet". He said:
The underwriters are buying the stock. That's why it's not falling below the offering price. There was a wall of buying when the stock dipped to the $38 offer price.[...] They started out with a fairly aggressive price range, then jacked it up and threw a lot more shares into the hopper. You either juice the number of shares or the price, you don't usually do both.
20.45 Here's an updated share price graph. The dotted line along the bottom represents the $38-mark where the shares started trading. Fifteen minutes to go...
20.39 That "heartburn" has contributed to the shares falling close to their IPO price of $38, at $38.08.
In other words, Mark Zuckerberg's worth has fallen from around $21bn to *just* $19bn in the space of a few hours.
20.30 Many investors who wanted a slice of the Facebook pie were left guessing today over whether their trades had been executed.
One investor told the Wall Street Journal that an order he had put in at 11.40am local time still hadn't been acknowledged by Nasdaq 40 minutes later. "It's not reasonable," he told the paper.
Another told Reuters:
Nasdaq's delay in passing back executions is causing a lot of heartburn on the Street.
20.19 All quiet on the Nasdaq front, as this tweet from Dominic Chu at Bloomberg illustrates:
19.47 Facebook's halo effect seems to have disappeared. Following earlier falls for Groupon, LinkedIn and Zynga (which saw its shares briefly suspended (see 16.57) things haven't got any better.
Groupon shares are now down by 6pc, while Zynga shares have fallen 10.7pc. Shares in Google have also fallen 1.1pc today.
Zynga makes games for Facebook, such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars
19.20 Facebook's current $111bn valuation means it is worth more than Ford ($38.3bn), Pepsi ($106.2bn) and McDonald's ($91.7bn), but less than Coca-Cola (at $167bn).
By comparison, Apple, the world's most valuable company by market cap, is worth $498.6bn, while ExxonMobil is worth $382.7bn.
Mark Zuckerberg alone is worth more than $20bn - that's more than half the value of the state-backed Royal Bank of Scotland, which has a current market cap of £22.2bn.
18.27 Here's how trading has fared so far. An initial frenzy saw the shares rise to $45, before easing back to their current level of $40.79.
18.08 Around 90 minutes after Facebook shares began trading, the price is sitting comfortably at around $41 per share, suggesting that Facebook's bank got its sums more or less right. Things have quietened down a little as analysts start to look towards the end of the day and wonder where Facebook shares will close.
17.42 Wondering how much richer Mark Zuckerberg is at precisely this moment? CNBC's real-time wealth tracker will tell you. Right now, the Facebook founder is almost $21bn better off.
17.29 From Pizza Dough to IPO - Mark Zuckerberg is a familiar face at Pinocchio’s Pizza in Harvard, so familiar there are now photos of him on the walls. During a recent visit, owner Adam DiCenso says, he picked up the tab and left a big tip. Though, not quite a billion dollars:
17.21 More on the 'Facebook is overpriced' theme. Daniel Knowles looks at the numbers and argues that there is no way investors will get a decent return on their investment, in part because people like him are leaving:
My friends barely use Facebook either. When I was a student, I used to log in approximately every ten minutes. If you said "Facebook break", everyone knew what you meant. When I logged in, I could guarantee a stream of amusing "banter" and gossip, as links and pictures were shared. Now, I log in, and it's a wasteland. Almost all the links I click on and the online running conversation I have has migrated to Twitter, which I check religiously. So too have all the most prolific Facebook users I used to know. While we probably still count as "regular users", for more and more of my generation, Facebook is little more than an electronic address book. That's why big advertisers, like GM, are reducing their spend on the company.
17.14 According to Reuters, 82 million Facebook shares were traded in the first 30 seconds on Nasdaq.
17.02 More from Katherine Rushton:
Facebook climbing again. Very early market jitters might be subsiding. Worth remembering that Google dropped below its IPO price on the first day of trading but stil ended more than 18pc up.
16.57 Our poll - downthread at 14.26 - currently has 78 per cent of respondents saying that Facebook is overpriced. It may be that the market agrees. After a brief increase earlier, prices are down close to the listing price of $38. As Katherine Rushton writes:
Facebook's shares have quickly fallen back to around the $38 a share price of their initial public offering, fuelling fears that it will sink back below its flotation price. The expected drop appears to be causing problems elsewhere. Zynga, the company which makes Facebook games like FarmVille, has had its shares suspended after its shares plunged.
16.47 There was talk earlier in the week of a Facebook 'halo effect' that would see other social media companies benefit from the Facebook IPO. So far that doesn't appear to be happening, as the Wall Street Journal has pointed out on Twitter:
16.42 Those early Frankfurt prices of $70 per share are looking a little bit excessive. After springing up to $42.05 per share when trading began, the price has settled a little, back to 40.01 at the time of writing.
16.35 Here's Katherine Rushton's view now that trading is underway:
Facebook has finally opened trading at $42.05 a share, valuing the company at $115bn. That makes it bigger than General Motors and Boeing, but not quite as big as Coca Cola or Amazon... or the UK's biggest corprate giant, HSBC.
16.31 And we're off. Facebook shares are trading at last and are up 11.2 per cent.
16.29 A quick joke while we wait:
16.23 Confusion reigns over what is happening at Nasdaq. Richard Blackden writes:
There is real confusion now over when shares in Facebook will begin trading. Nasdaq, the exchange that Facebook picked over the New York Stock Exchange, said it is "experiencing a delay" in opening trading. They have not said why, but the sheer volume of orders from retail investors may well be behind what is an embarrassing delay both for Nasdaq and Facebook.
16.20 Share trading is delayed. Traders experiencing problems.
16.14 Facebook's opening price is expected to be $42 with 65 million shares trading.
16.10 Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of digital rival Twitter has just tweeted a nice joke about the news agenda of the day.
16.04 According to the Twitterverse, including Andrew Bloch, the vice-chairman and founder of Frank PR, Mark Zuckerberg's dad was gifted a stake in Facebook in 2009. He has just enjoyed a major windfall.
16.01 Facebook's stock has been delayed by five minutes.
15.50 Here is a video of Mark Zuckerberg opening the NASDAQ remotely - ringing the bell from Facebook's California headquarters as the company began trading on the stock market:
15.45 Facebook shares reported to be trading in Frankfurt at $70 ahead of market opening - giving Facebook a potential market capitalisation of nearly $192bn.
15.28 Eduardo Saverin co-founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg before the pair fell out. Zuckerberg diluted Saverin's shares in the company to prevent him from controlling the future of the business, leading to a lawsuit that was settled out of court. Earlier this month Saverin confirmed that he would renounce his American citizenship, in a move that many said was an attempt to avoid paying taxes in the US. Saverin denies that. Today the 30-year-old Brazilian American Singaporean has congratulated Zuckerberg on - what else - his Facebook feed:
On the eve of the Facebook public float, 8 plus year in the making, I as co-founder wanted to look back and cherish Facebook's early beginning. Congrats to everyone involved in the project from day one till today, and I especially wanted to congratulate Mark Zukerberg [sic] on keeping tremendous stead-fast focus, however hard that was, on making the world a more open and connected place.
15.17 Here is Mark Zuckerberg ringing the bell to open Nasdaq trading:
15.06 As well as ringing the bell, Mark Zuckerberg has announced the Facebook IPO in a status update on, where else, Facebook. "Mark Zuckerberg listed a company on Nasdaq," it says.
14.53 There is an hour to go until Facebook shares begin trading. If you want to know how you can buy Facebook shares, Katherine Rushton has all the details:
Most brokers will require you to pay the money for your first trade up front, although many will happily buy up to £10,000 of relatively reliable stocks on your behalf after that, without prior payment. They might have trouble getting their hands on Facebook stock for the first couple of hours of trading, but things are expected to ease up after that.
14.46 Richard Blackden, the Telegraph's US business editor, writes from New York:
The Nasdaq may be in New York, but most of the key players in Facebook's story will be in California today. Zuckerberg rang the bell remotely from Facebook's Silicon Valley headquarters, and Robert Zoellick, the chief executive of the Nasdaq, was there too. The handful of analysts who have already started publishing research on the company are also based on the west coast. Arvind Bhatia, who covers the company for stockbroker Sterne Agee, cautions that today will all be about emotion. "Emotion will drive the shares today. It won't be about fundamentals," he explains.
14.35 Mark Zuckerberg has rung the bell to open trading on Nasdaq. In ringing that bell Mark Zuckerberg has made himself the 29th richest person on the planet. And yes, he was wearing his hoodie when he rang the bell.
14.26 I've fed in a few opinions from analysts and other experts. Now it's time to find out what you think about Facebook's valuation. Having read your comments so far, I think I have an idea about how this will go...
14.18 Mark Zuckerberg is expected to ring the bell to start trading in around 15 minutes. Facebook shares still won't be on sale until 4pm, UK time. Meanwhile, my sceptical thoughts have landed in my inbox, this time from the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Their research highlights the following:
Only a third of UK companies (32%) are confident that being on Facebook is beneficial to their growth. More UK companies are on Twitter (71%) than on Facebook (55%). Half of UK companies who are active on social media don’t collect or store data from their engagement with fans and followers.
13.59 James Purnell, the former Labour Work and Pensions Secretary, has a novel idea to solve the Eurozone crisis. Using Facebook.
Very old Labour, that.
13.41 Another worry for some investors has been the way Mark Zuckerberg has structured the IPO so that he will maintain complete control of the firm. Reuters' Lucy Marcus explains:
Several troubling issues call into question how this company can consider itself groundbreaking, innovative or new: the concentration of power in the hands of one man, the stranglehold on voting rights, the lack of diversity in the boardroom (which in a way is inconsequential, as the Facebook board does not have much bite anyway), and above all else the flagrant disregard of the lessons of the past several years about engaged, active and independent boards contributing to strong companies
13.19 Wall Street is definitely excited about today's big event, but in the longer term there remain serious doubts about Facebook's prospects as a business. The Telegraph's technology correspondent Christopher Williams wrote about some of these concerns recently.
It told the Securities Exchange Commission, the Wall Street regulator, that in the three months to March 31 it made a profit of $205m. Which is nice, but not as nice as the $233m it earned in the same period last year, and just a little over 20 cents for each of its members.
Yahoo!, widely seen as an online media business in decline, meanwhile grew its profits in the quarter from $223m to $286m A speedbump on Mark Zuckerberg's road to El Dorado, perhaps, but this isn't how Silicon Valley success stories are supposed to go. Google's profits never dipped year-on-year as it prepared to float, back in 2004.
Facebook's financial standing look even worse compared to Google when you consider that its revenues actually rose year-on-year, from $731m to $1.06bn. That means its margin was battered in the last 12 months. Facebook blamed its hiring of an extra 1,000 staff and big increases in its sales and marketing, and research and development spending. Google was making similar investments at the same point in its history, yet profits contuinued to soar.
It's led some skeptical commentators to ask the question this week 'what if Facebook isn't so special after all?'. What if it's just not that profitable a business? What if its costs keep rising as it acquires new members in developing countries, who have similar storage and bandwidth demands to their Western counterparts but nowhere near the same value to advertisers? What if it never attains Google-style scalabilty and mega-profitability?
13.02 While we're on the subject of Mark Zuckerberg, there have been other doubts raised about the young CEO, who was 28 on Monday. One analyst suggested that Zuckerberg's decision to arrive for a meeting with investors wearing a hoodie was a sign of "immaturity". Earlier today, instant messages Zuckerberg sent in his student days were republished. They show him mocking his users and plotting against other students. When the messages first surfaced, two years ago, Zuckerberg said he "absolutely" regretted them and that he had "grown and learned a lot" since.
12.46 One of the problems Facebook has to face is monetising its vast membership - more than 900 million people at the last count - particularly on mobile, where usage is growing but Facebook is making little revenue. However, there are also questions about the CEO. Mark Baxter, of IT recruiter Greythorn, says:
But there’s another problem with facebook – its founder. In research we conducted at the beginning of the year, Mark Zuckerberg rated as IT professionals’ most unpopular industry figure – beating both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs comprehensively. This explains why more than three quarters of professionals told us they considered the initial valuation of facebook was too high. There are still big questions about Zuckerberg’s ability to lead a company as prominent and valuable as facebook to further growth which could yet take the shine off their IPO.
12.25 It's coming up to 7.30am in New York. Nasdaq opens in two hours and shares in Facebook will start trading at 4pm. What will happen to the share price after that? Katherine Rushton says:
Facebook and its underwriters will be hoping for an increase, but not the sort of doubling in value that we saw with LinkedIn last year. If Facebook's value did that, it would imply that the banks had seriously undervalued it and Facebook had missed out on billions of additional funds it could have got its hands on.
12.18 The impending float is generating plenty of good jokes on Twitter:
12.08 Facebook began the build-up to the IPO with an all-night hackathon at its California headquarters. Mark Zuckerberg launched the event, inviting thousands of Facebook employees to spend the night experimenting with new technology products and ideas.
12.00 Earlier this week I spoke to analysts about Facebook and asked whether the company was over-priced, given that so much of its value is based on its potential to bring in advertising revenue. The article covers the background to the float and explains some of the questions still hanging over the social network. However, the analysts I spoke to were generally positive. Ben Wood, managing director of digital marketing agency iProspect, told me:
In the context of Facebook’s evolution, it’s still a pretty new business. It is too much to expect brands and Facebook to have totally resolved what the business model is.
11.50 But Facebook's business model is still relativaly unproven and that makes some potential advertisers, not to mention investors, nervous. Emma Barnett, the Telegraph's digital media editor, explains:
11.40 The Telegraph's interactive graphic shows which of the investors, including U2's Bono, will gain from the flotation and how much they stand to make.
11.35 The social network, which was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard dorm room, will float on Wall Street later today. The initial public offering (IPO) will be the second largest in history, after Visa. Katherine Rusthton reports:
The social network priced its flotation at $38 a share, valuing the company at $104bn (£65.8bn) - more than any other US company has been worth on the day of its market debut.
The business, which was founded by 28-year old Mark Zuckerberg from his dorm room at Harvard University, raised more than $16bn in the process, marking the second biggest initial public offering there has even been. Only Visa’s was larger.
Shares in Facebook are expected to climb even higher when they begin trading on Nasdaq, under the FB ticker, as frenzied demand from investors outweighs concerns over the long-term prospects of the business.
11.30am (06.30am New York) Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of the Facebook flotation on Nasdaq.