The Valuation of Twitter has been an important topic of discussion, lately. With recent reports valuing the company between $11 billion to $9 billion. However, it now appears that the real value of the company is marginally under $10 billion.
According to a report from Fortune, another block of shares for employees are available, which are valued at $9.9 billion.
“The shares were secured by a fund affiliated with Gentry Venture Partners, which has been pitching the deal to clients,” Fortune wrote. “It would seem the premium was to prevent the offering from being prevented by Twitter, which has been particularly stingy with employee liquidity — apparently in a response to the Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) free-for-all. No word yet on how many shares are in the block, or how well Gentry is doing in terms of attracting interest.”
The report did not reveal the number of shares in the block offered early to employees; what is interesting to note is that the new block of shares follows an offer from global investment manager, BlackRock, Inc. (NYSE:BLK) to buy an $80 million stake in Twitter at a $9 billion valuation.
The figure represents a 10 percent hike in the valuation of the company when compared to the last valuation at the time of fund raising in 2011.
Rumors have long been circulating that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) might be interested in buying Twitter. If such an alliance was struck, Twitter would have more tools in its arsenal to compete with the Facebook. Another reason why Twitter will be a good acquisition for Apple will be, because Twitter is truly mobile, while Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) does not fit well in a small screen.
Launched in 2006, San Francisco based Twitter has become a live-news feed for online users. The company doubled its users to 200 million in December and also added a new feature that users to send videos.
The revenues for twitter are expected to reach $1bn by 2014. There have been talks that the company may come up with an initial public offering later this year or early next year.
