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Facebook Shares Fall Below IPO Price

Dawn Megli |
May 21, 2012 | 11:48 a.m. PDT

Executive Producer

Technical problems with NASDAQ were blamed for sinking prices but analysts disagree. (Creative Commons)
Technical problems with NASDAQ were blamed for sinking prices but analysts disagree. (Creative Commons)
One hour into its second day of trading, Facebook shares fell to 12 percent below Friday's closing price, trading at $33.72. This means that Facebook stock is seling for a lower price than what was offered to Wall Street's preferred investors. 

"At the moment it's not living up to the hype," Frank Lesh, a futures analyst and broker at FuturePath Trading LLC in Chicago told CNBC, adding that some people may have decided to hang back and buy the stock on the declines.

According to Bloomberg:

With a valuation of $104.8 billion at the May 18 close, Facebook was already worth more than three times the other 10 U.S. consumer Internet companies to have gone public in the past year; LinkedIn (LNKD), valued at $10.3 billion, is second.

“It’s hard to justify Facebook going for sixty times” said blogger and newsletter writer Eddy Elfenbein“in a market where Apple (AAPL) is going for less than 10 times next year’s estimate.”

So what price can be justified? Elfenbein calculates that Facebook’s estimated 2013 earnings of $1 a share, combined with its projected 50 percent earnings growth rate for the next five years—and there’s no guarantee the company will meet those estimates—give it a fair value of $33 a share. Even so, he says buying the stock would be prudent only at closer to $23. 

Marketplace's Heidi Moore denied rumors that the slipping stock price was due to technical problems with the NASDAQ market. 

"There were arguments that trouble getting those orders filled may have dragged down the price on Friday," Moore said, "but now it’s Monday, and really what this shows is that investors don’t think Facebook is worthy of a market value greater than Pepsi or McDonalds."

 

Reach Dawn Megli here; follow her on Twitter here.



 

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