Zuckerberg's Facebook stake is worth at least $16 billion

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February 2, 2012

At age 27, Mark Zuckerberg is about to officially become a paper billionaire.

In the IPO paperwork Facebook filed Wednesday, the company reported that its founder and CEO owns more than a quarter of the company. Zuckerberg holds roughly 534 million shares.

What those shares are actually worth is a question for the open market to sort out when Facebook begins trading its shares publicly later this year. But Facebook said in its IPO paperwork that its own internal valuation puts their current value at $29.73 per share.

That means Zuckerberg's stake is worth $16 billion -- enough to make him one of the 50 richest people on the planet, by Forbes' calculation.

But Facebook's valuation is fairly conservative. Analysts have ballparked the company's market value at $85 billion or more.

If that higher valuation holds up when the company goes public, Zuckerberg would be worth $24 billion or more. That'll put him in Forbes'top-10 list.

He's not the only one poised to make bucketloads on Facebook.

Accel Partners, the first major venture capitalist to fund Facebook, owns around 11% of the company. It invested $12.7 million in April 2005 and now has a stake worth roughly $6 billion, as of Facebook's last valuation.

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz owns the third-highest number of shares, with 134 million. His 8% stake in the company is worth roughly $4 billion.

The Russian venture capital group DST Global's 131 million shares -- a 5% stake -- are worth roughly $3.9 billion. And investor Peter Thiel, who put up $500,000 to get Facebook through its first summer of operations, now owns a 2.5% stake worth $1.3 billion.

Though Zuckerberg only controls a 28% stake in the company, every other major shareholder -- including Breyer, Moskovitz, DST and Thiel -- has agreed to allow Zuckerberg to act as a proxy to vote with their shares.

That gives Zuckerberg voting control over 57% of Facebook's shares. The unusual arrangement means he'll essentially have sole decision-making power over Facebook.

Most of Zuckerberg's wealth is on paper. As the dot-com boom-and-bust illustrated, paper gains can vanish fast if a company's market value plunges.

But Zuckerberg has also collected some cold, hard cash over the years. Last year, he made $483,000, took home a $220,500 bonus, and received additional perks like private jet travel valued at $783,000.

His regular paycheck is about to be slashed, though. As of next year, Zuckerberg will make just $1 a year.

He didn't receive any more stock in 2011, and likely won't get any additional stock-based compensation after the company goes public. Facebook said in its filing that the company's directors believe Zuckerberg's current stock "sufficiently aligns his interests with those of our stockholders."

Facebook's No. 2 Sheryl Sandberg is actually the most handsomely paid at the company. She took home about $300,000 last year, with a $90,000 bonus, but received $30 million in stock grants.

David Ebersman, the company's chief financial officer, had the same cash bonus and salary as Sandberg, and got $18 million in stock-based compensation. Facebook's chief engineer, Mike Schroepfer, made a total of about $25 million last year in stock and cash, and the company's lawyer took home a cool $7 million.  Retweet this story

South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor, the world's second-largest maker of memory chips, in red

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february 2, 2012

South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor, the world's second-largest maker of memory chips, said Thursday it swung into the red in the fourth quarter as chip prices fell on weak demand for personal computers.

The net loss was 239.9 billion won ($213.1 million) in October-December compared to a net profit of 30 billion won a year earlier, the company said. It was the second consecutive quarterly net loss.

Fourth-quarter sales fell 7.2 percent year-on-year to 2.55 trillion won, and the operating loss was 167.5 billion won compared to an operating profit of 293.7 billion a year earlier.

For the whole of last year the company's net loss was 56 billion won, compared with a net profit of 2.6 trillion won the previous year. Sales fell 14.1 percent on-year to 10.4 trillion won and operating profit dropped 89.1 percent to 325.5 billion won.

"Last year, global economic uncertainty and natural disasters in Japan and Thailand undercut demand for tech products," the company said in a statement.

The prices of DRAM chips used in personal computers have been dropping since September 2010. Last year's floods in Thailand, the world's leading maker of computer drives, also hit global computer markets.

Hynix competes with Samsung Electronics in the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chip market and with Japan's Toshiba in the NAND flash memory market.

Hynix said DRAM prices fell 19 percent in the fourth quarter and prices of NAND dropped 17 percent. 

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Top Facebook executives surpassed Zuckerberg in pay

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 february 2, 2012 

Facebook's chief operating officer made more than $30.5 million last year, more than 20 times what founder Mark Zuckerberg earned as the CEO of the social networking giant, company IPO filings Wednesday showed.

The filings with the Security and Exchange Commission give Zuckerberg's total compensation in 2011 as $1,487,362 dollars.

That includes $483,333 in salary, $220,500 in bonuses and $783,529 in "other compensation," which a footnote explained was mostly for chartered aircraft used to fly Zuckerberg's family and friends around.

On paper at least, Zuckerberg's top executives made far more.

Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, a former top Google executive lured away by Facebook in 2008, earned $30,873,579 last year -- nearly $30.5 million of it in stock awards.

Her salary in 2011 was $295,833 and she received another $86,133 in bonuses.

Next highest on the compensation ladder was Facebook's vice president of engineering, Mark Schroepfer, who pulled in $24.7 in total compensation, almost all of it in stock awards. His salary: $270,833.

Facebook's chief financial officer, David Ebersman, received a higher salary than Schroepfer -- $295,833 -- but his total compensation including stock awards was less, about $18.7 million.

Theodore Ullyot, the company's vice president, general counsel and secretary, made $6.9 million. His salary was the same as Schroefer's, $270,833, but he made nearly $479,000 in bonuses and about $6.1 million in stock awards.

The filing said the bonuses reported did not include those from the second half of the fiscal year, which have not been determined yet. 

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IPO: The Rise Of Facebook

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february 2, 2012

Investors came down with Facebook fever after the social networking titan filed to go public and seek to raise $5 billion in the largest flotation ever by an Internet company on Wall Street.

The paperwork filed on Wednesday for the initial public offering provided the first glimpse of the financial details of the Web giant launched eight years ago by Mark Zuckerberg from his Harvard University dorm room.

Zuckerberg, who was just 19 when he founded the network, penned a letter to investors outlining what he said were the core values of Facebook and said it "was not originally created to be a company.

"It was built to accomplish a social mission -- to make the world more open and connected," the Facebook chief executive said in the letter accompanying the filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

"There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future," he said.

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Fact file on Facebook, including a chart showing the rise of active users worldwide. Social networking titan filed to go public on Wednesday, seeking to raise $5 billion in the largest flotation ever by an Internet company on Wall Street.

Facebook said it will list on Wall Street as "FB" but did not set a date for when it would begin trading or specify whether it would be on the Nasdaq Stock Market or the New York Stock Exchange.

Gartner technology analyst Michael Gartenberg did not expect the stock market debut to have much of an impact on the average user, but said the extra cash would allow the firm to grow and give it a new edge on competitors.

"Facebook going public doesn't have that much implication for the vast majority of Facebook users unless they plan on buying shares -- when they can finally get their hands on them," Gartenberg said.

"Google didn't change for users for the most part when it became public," he said. "It grew. It expanded out to other services."

At $5 billion, Facebook's initial public offering would be the largest ever by a technology company, eclipsing the $1.9 billion raised by Internet search giant Google when it went public in 2004 at a valuation of $23 billion.

Facebook's $5 billion fund-raising target is only preliminary, however, and can be increased based on investor interest. Initial estimates held that Facebook would seek to raise at least $10 billion.

The Palo Alto, California-based company reported net income of $668 million last year, up from $372 million the previous year.

Revenue nearly doubled to $3.7 billion in 2011, with most of it coming from targeted advertising gleaned from personal information shared by the hundreds of millions of users of the platform.

"The company is more profitable than we had expected," said Kathleen Smith of Renaissance Capital, an IPO investment adviser.

Facebook's revenue of $3.7 billion last year, however, was slightly lower than estimates which had pegged it at $4.27 billion.

Facebook, the leading social network in all but six countries, notably China and Russia, said it has over 845 million users including 483 million who log in daily.

Facebook's value has been estimated at $75 billion and $100 billion.

A market capitalization of $100 billion would put Facebook on a par with McDonald's ($101 billion), well ahead of Boeing ($55 billion) but behind Apple ($426 billion) and Google ($189 billion).

Zuckerberg, whose net worth has been estimated at $17.5 billion by Forbes magazine, is the largest individual shareholder in Facebook and controls 57 percent of voting shares, according to the SEC filing.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a keynote address during the Facebook f8 conference in 2011 in San Francisco. Social networking titan filed paperwork to go public on Wednesday, seeking to raise $5 billion on Wall Street in the largest flotation ever by an Internet company.

But he was not the highest paid.

Sheryl Sandberg, who was lured away from Google four years ago to serve as Facebook's chief operating officer, made more than $30.5 million last year while vice president of engineering Mark Schroepfer pulled in $24.7 million.

Zuckerberg's total package was $1.49 million.

Gartenberg said Facebook's IPO would be the largest by a technology company in 2012 by far, but others contemplating going public will be closely watching how it fares.

Facebook shares are not expected to begin trading for several months, but the excitement was already running high, with the announcement -- along with recent manufacturing growth -- sending stocks up on Wednesday.

"It's hard to think of an IPO in recent memory -- even going back to Google and before that maybe to the Netscape IPO or the Yahoo IPO -- to see this type of frenzy," Gartenberg said.

Career-oriented social network LinkedIn went public in 2011 and promptly doubled its value.

Online daily deals site Groupon and social games titan Zynga were up 7.5 percent and six percent respectively on Wednesday over their IPO price. 

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Facebook's to creat 1,000 millionaires among employees

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February 2, 2012

With Facebook's announcement Wednesday that it will become a publicly traded company, lots of folks were talking about it.

On Facebook.

The company filed Wednesday to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering. Most analysts predict that Facebook's valuation will ultimately fall somewhere between $85 billion and $100 billion.

Those staggering numbers had Facebook users -- those whose privacy settings defaulted to public -- largely pondering one major school of thought: "Wow, that's a lot of money."

Facebook  the big-dollar opening says a lot of careers in the tech industry.

Facebook's IPO expected to create between 500 and 1,000 millionaires among employees. Soo the answer is: Software Engineer.

The Facebook IPO is expected to créate a flood of investors.

Facebook earned $1 billion last year on sales of $3.7 billion. The site said it now has more than 845 million daily active users.

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Computers&Filmmaking: Video of the making of the movie Avatar

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Computer&biz: motivational words

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Business opportunity are like buses,
 when one goes, another one will always come. ( by Richard brandson, Virgin airline) Retweet this story