If Facebook can raise $5 billion in its initial public offering, it will join a select group of Internet companies. The Daily Beast rounds up the biggest Internet IPOs of all time.
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Not even a year after acquiring the online travel company, the Blackstone Group decided to take Orbitz public again. Orbitz raised $510 million in its July 2007 IPO.
The daily deals site netted $700 million in its November 2011 IPO. The Chicago-based company, which was valued between $10 billion and $12 billion, hit a few snags along the way to its debut, facing questions about its accounting practices and business model.
When this major Chinese social-networking company, went public in May 2011, investors looked to the $743 million raised in its IPO as a model of what they might expect from a Facebook offering. The stock surged in its first day of trading.
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The third-largest online-game designer in China, Giant Interactive netted $887 million in its IPO before premiering on the New York Stock Exchange in October 2007.
Investors soured quickly on the much-anticipated $1 billion IPO raised by the maker of Farmville. The company rode a wave of investor enthusiasm when it premiered in December 2011 at $10 a share, but prices dropped below that within minutes of trading.
This Chinese maker of online games made friends with investors on both sides of the Pacific with its 2009 IPO, raising $1.04 billion.
A California-based data communications company (now a part of BT Group PLC), Infonet raised $1.08 billion in its IPO way back in 1999.
Russia’s most popular search engine raised some serious buzz with its 2011 debut. The company, which reportedly has three times more business than Google in Russia, scored a $1.3 billion IPO.
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The search-engine granddaddy raised $1.67 billion in its 2004 IPO.
The social network’s filing Wednesday marks the first step to raise $5 billion in what is one of most widely anticipated IPOs of all time. The company, which revealed in its filings with the SEC that it had a profit of $1 billion in 2011, will gain access to new capital after it goes public. The deal is also likely to launch founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg into the dizzying stratosphere inhabited by the world’s richest billionaires.
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