Facebook sets IPO price

Facebook has priced its IPO at $38 per share, at the top of the range, and valued the group at US$104 billion. There are 421.2 million shares.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s stake is worth $19 billion.

Read Track Facebook’s worth in real time to learn more about its first trading day and the hype surrounding the company’s value.

The investment banks orchestrating the offering will determine the price at which they plan to sell the stock to their clients.

Facebook’s stock will begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market on Friday under the ticker symbol FB.

The offering is expected to reap a $16 billion windfall for Facebook and its selling shareholders, making it the third-largest U.S. IPO in history and the seventh-biggest IPO in the world.

For the social network that re-imagined how people communicate online, the stock sale means more money to operate the data centres that hold the trove of status updates, photos and videos shared by Facebook’s 900 million users. It means more money to hire the best engineers to work at its sprawling Menlo Park, CA, headquarters, or in New York City, where it opened an engineering office last year.

And it means early investors, who took a chance seeding the young social network with start-up funds six, seven and eight years ago, can reap big rewards. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who sits on Facebook’s board of directors, invested $500,000 in the company back in 2004. He’s selling nearly 17 million of his shares in the IPO, which means he’ll get some $646 million.

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