Excerpt:<p>"Facebook earned $355 million in net income in the first nine months of 2010 on revenue of $1.2 billion, according to documents that Goldman Sachs is providing to clients.<p>...<p>The Goldman customer said he received a separate six-page financial statement containing information on the social networking firm.<p>...<p>The financial statements were not audited and offered little detail about how Facebook generates it revenue, said the source, who did not want to be identified because he had signed a non-disclosure agreement."
Let's do Math!<p>Let's see if the $50B valuation is as outrageous as many seem to think. :)<p>Projecting earnings to $500m for 2010 gives them a P/E of 100.<p>I agree that a P/E of ~100 is high for a mature company: GOOG is ~24, YHOO is ~22, AMZN is ~75, EBAY is ~14.<p>Obviously Facebook isn't a mature company at the moment, though, but what their earnings would have to be to keep the $50B valuation with a P/E of 30? $1.66B<p>Earnings of $1.6B is a lot of money, but Yahoo had earnings of $1.4B last year, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that Facebook will be earning more than Yahoo within a couple of years.
personally I think that the 50 billion valuation is just a negotiation tactic. They start off at 50 billion, so that when they actually IPO at 25 billion, everyone will think they are getting an awesome deal that will double their money in no time.
In pitching as much as $1.5 billion in stock in the closely held social-networking company to wealthy investors, Goldman Sachs disclosed that it might sell or hedge its own $375 million investment without warning clients.<p>Source:
<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-07/goldman-efforts-to-burnish-image-may-be-undermined-by-facebook.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-07/goldman-efforts-to-...</a>
So based on $133/million per month in revs is ~ $1.6 billion this year.<p>Current valuation on SecondMarket = $50 billion<p>$50 billion/$1.6 Billion = a 31.25 multiple.<p>5 to 10 times revenues seems to be a reasonable way to value startups/private companies nowadays (for the most part). But a multiple of 31.25? Wow.
So it seems that Facebook is generating significant profits, unless something funky went on in the last few months, so why take such a large investment?
Assuming no growth; risk free + equity risk premium = 8% + company lasts infinitely (or for a long time):
355<i>1e6/.75/.08 = 5.91</i>10e9, or 6 billion.<p>Let's assume they grow to five times their current income over the next five years; and, ooh, I am busy - just multiply the previous number by five to get an approximation.
So if you bought the whole company at a $50b valuation, and assume that this $355m/yr profit rate for first 9 months held constant and therefore turned into $473m total by end of year, and then that rate held constant each year on forward, and that all profits were always and evenly distributed to all shareholders, then you'd recoup your investment (merely break even, anyway) after 105 years.<p>Add in an unpredictable future growth rate. Add in the fact that they're probably approaching a hard cap on users in the next year or so. Add in bubble-ishness. Add in a big unknown as to whether they find ways to better monetize their users. And all this adds up to telling me either this is a bad investment, or, maybe just maybe it will at least break even within your lifetime. Can't say. But from this data I think it is not clear that this is a slam dunk buy at all. Either bad or meh.