Twitter has seen a fantastic day on Wall Street following their debut as a public company, with their value opening at $45.10 per share.
A limited number of shares were offered at the beginning of the week as they prepared for their initial debut on Tuesday. At the time, the social network listed their price at an optimistic $26 per share. But within hours the price began to rise, reaching $50 at its peak before settling back at $45.10, a more than 70% increase in worth.
When first setting their worth projections last month, it was set at $1 billion. This was a number they only hoped to reach over time, and a tentative step of a company first going public.
Now, with the surge of value in their shares, the network is worth an estimated $25 billion, an astonishing 25 times the initial projection. In addition to this, co founders Ev Williams and Jack Dorsey have increased their personal wealth by billions of dollars, with Dorsey owning 23.4 million shares (estimates at $1 billion), and Williams 56.9 million shares (estimated at $2.5 billion).
The Guardian asked City Index’s Joshua Raymond about the result, who admitted to being surprised.
We knew Twitter shares would be in high demand, but this still goes down as hugely impressive, and is further evidence of the hunger to invest in innovative new media type.
IPOs are, of course, highly volatile, so while this would appear to be a very successful market debut for Twitter, we must take a step back and judge investor appetite over a longer period of time.
Despite that warning, it seems unlikely that investor interest will die out. Twitter is one of the most popular social networks on the web. They are also one of the primary developers in the world of mobile advertising, an ever growing niche that is set to expand by leaps and bounds over the coming few years.
Twitter also revolutionized the social scene on the internet, has integrated themselves with just about every facet of digital life imaginable, and completely reinvented both the hashtag and live search algorithms. Finding people to buy shares of their stock won’t prove too difficult in the long term.
One thing is certain: all eyes are going to be on Wall Street to see where the share ends up in the coming weeks.
Source: ABC News
