Twitter has taken the cover off its initial public offering, making public its prospectus and setting the clock on one of the most anticipated stock sales of the year.
Twitter’s prospectus â€" whose filing was initially disclosed in a 135-character post on its own service last month â€" offers the fullest look yet at the privately held company.
The company’s growth has been smaller than anticipated. It reported 215 million average monthly users. Twitter reported revenue of $317 million in 2012, and $253 million for the first six months of this year.
The social network disclosed that it plans to use the ticker symbol “TWTR,†but didn’t specify a stock exchange. It also listed a $1 billion fund-raising target, a pro forma number meant to calculate listing fees.
With the regulatory filing late on Thursday, Twitter now has about three weeks until it kicks off a road show to potential investors across the country, in what is expected to be a series of standing-room-only meetings.
The company has hoped to complete its offering by Thanksgiving, people briefed on the matter have said. But if the markets prove unwelcoming â€" a possibility if the government shutdown goes on for weeks â€" the company is likely to postpone the offering until next year.
Twitter’s impending I.P.O. seizes on the continued growth of social networking and mobile devices, two trends that the company has ridden to enormous growth. Founded seven years ago as a side project in a floundering start-up, it is now one of the world’s biggest public forums, ranking alongside Facebook. And aspects of the service, like hashtags denoting specific discussion topics, have infiltrated popular culture.
The company has turned its deceptively simple product, short messages no longer than 140 characters, into a global phenomenon used by more than 200 million users. It has found a way to make that business profitable through advertising, notably through so-called sponsored tweets that resemble regular users’ posts.
If successful, the stock offering would create a windfall for Twitter’s investors, a raft of venture capital firms and individuals who have poured money into the company for years. They include the social network’s three founders, Ev Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone; the investment firms Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz; and investors like Chris Sacca and Kevin Rose.
Deal makers hope that Twitter’s offering will help lead a revival in technology public listings, after the market underperformed for much of 2013. Technology companies have accounted for just 19 percent of all initial offerings so far this year, the smallest share since 2008, according to the research firm Renaissance Capital.
Some of that decline took place after Facebook’s botched I.P.O. last year, as well as periods of market turmoil as recently as this summer.
But analysts say that investors are eager to take a piece of technology start-ups, especially fast-growing companies that appear poised to continue expanding â€" and someday make healthy profit margins. Despite a flawed debut, Facebook’s shares now trade 29 percent higher than their offering price, as the social networking giant demonstrates strong growth in advertising revenue.
Two start-ups, the advertising technology company Rocket Fuel and the cybsersecurity provider FireEye, leaped by double-digit percentages in their debuts last month.
And shares of LinkedIn, the social network that kicked off the current round of Internet I.P.O.’s, have risen more than fivefold since their May 2011 debut.
Potential buyers aren’t the only firms eager for a piece of Twitter’s offering. Wall Street banks have battled for months for the privilege of leading the stock sale, which will bestow prestige and bragging rights. Goldman Sachs won that fight and is serving as lead underwriter, with Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank joining as additional advisers.
One thing the I.P.O. probably will not bring is high fees, since companies staging big offerings can command sharply lower rates. Facebook paid fees of just 1.1 percent for its $16 billion offering last year.
