Twitter is thought to be planning to reveal the details of its initial public offering this week, after it filed the necessary documents confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission on 12 September.
By making use of the American Jobs Act, the company was able to file its draft S-1 form in secret since it has revenue of under $1bn.
The act was designed to make it quicker and easier for companies to go public, removing obstacles such as as the requirement to submit a public prospectus months before shares actually go on sale.
The early September announcement was not required by the act, and a leak to business website Quartz claimed that the filing had actually happened two months earlier, in July.
That means it will make its IPO filing public this week, and likely begin trading before the US Thanksgiving holiday in late November.
Twitter will be hoping to avoid the problems that afflicted the last major web IPO – Facebook. The company filed its draft prospectus in public over three months before it eventually hit the markets in May 2012, but flotation day was beset by technical difficulties.
Concerns about Facebook’s readiness for the consumer shift to mobile saw its value drop dramatically from $45 per share on the first day of trading, but it took until August 2013 for its value to return to that level.
source: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/30/twitter-files-for-thanksgiving-ipo
