LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) Leaps 10% on Earnings Beat, Rosy View

Northern, WI 5/4/12 (StreetBeat) -- Shares of LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD: 118.79, +9.38, +8.57%) soared 10% Friday morning as Wall Street cheers the professional social network’s bullish results and upbeat guidance.

A slew of analysts hiked their price targets on the recently-public company a day after it released stronger-than-expected first-quarter results and unveiled a $118.8 million acquisition.

“LinkedIn is disrupting both the online and offline job recruitment markets, and deeper corporate penetration and increasing member engagement will drive strong results going forward,” Doug Anmuth, an analyst at JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM: 42.32, -0.69, -1.60%), wrote in a research note, according to Reuters.

Mountain View, Calif.-based LinkedIn said late Thursday it earned $5 million, or 4 cents a share, last quarter, up from $2.1 million, or breakeven, a year earlier. Excluding one-time items, it earned 15 cents a share, easily beating forecasts for 9 cents a share.

Revenue raced 101% higher to $188.5 million, topping the Street’s view of $178.6 million.

LinkedIn also raised its full-year guidance, projecting 2012 sales of $880 million to $900 million. Even the low end of that new range would exceed estimates from analysts for $876.8 million. Likewise, LinkedIn projected second-quarter revenue of $210 million to $215 million, compared with the Street’s view of $207.9 million.

In response to the upbeat numbers, Anmuth of JPMorgan raised his price target on LinkedIn to $135 from $90 and maintained an “overweight” rating.

LinkedIn also unveiled a cash-and-stock deal to acquire content sharing company SlideShare for $118.75 million.

Shares of LinkedIn soared 9.88% to $120.22, tacking onto their 2012 surge of 69%.

LinkedIn shares have nearly tripled since going public at $45 last year.

Later this month social-networking leader Facebook is set to launch a massive initial public offering that could value the Mark Zuckerberg company at nearly $100 billion. By comparison, LinkedIn’s market cap stood at just under $11 billion as of Thursday’s close.

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Facebook gearing up for 2012 IPO

Palm Beach, FL 11/29/11 (StreetBeat) --Facebook, the world's largest Internet social network, is preparing for a initial public stock offering next year, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Facebook is exploring raising $10 billion, the Wall Street Journal said on Monday. It hopes the offering will value the company at more than $100 billion, according to WSJ, which first reported the story. Facebook's Chief Financial Officer, David Ebersman, had discussed a public float with Silicon Valley bankers but founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg had not decided on any terms and his plans could change, the Journal said.

The social network, which now claims more than 800 million members after seven years of explosive growth, has not selected bankers to manage what would be a very closely watched IPO. But it had drafted an internal prospectus and was ready at any moment to pull the IPO trigger, the Journal cited people familiar with the matter as saying.

At $100 billion valuation, the company started by Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm room would have double the valuation of Hewlett-Packard, the Journal said. A formal S-1 filing could come before the end of the year, though nothing was decided, the newspaper added. A Facebook representative declined to comment.

Silicon Valley start-ups have this year begun to test investor appetite for a new wave of dotcoms. If it does debut in 2012, Facebook's IPO would dwarf that of any other dotcom waiting to go public.

"Farmville" creator Zynga has filed for an IPO of up to $1 billion. In November, daily deals service Groupon debuted with much fanfare, only to plunge below its IPO price within weeks. LinkedIn and Pandora are now also trading significantly below the levels their stocks reached during their public debuts earlier this year.

Facebook has become one of the world's most popular Web destinations, challenging established companies such as Google Inc and Yahoo Inc for consumers' online time and for advertising dollars. Facebook does not disclose its financial results, but a source familiar with the situation told Reuters earlier this year that the company's revenue in the first six months of 2011 doubled year-on-year to $1.6 billion.

Eric Feng, a former partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who now runs social-networking site Erly.com, said that the cash Facebook will get in an IPO would allow them to make more acquisitions and refine or work on new projects, such as a rumored-Facebook phone or a netbook.

Having tradeable stock will also allow Facebook to attract more engineering talent who might have been more attracted to the company in earlier days when it was growing faster but now perhaps might be attracted to other companies. "It'll be a powerful bullet for them," said Feng.

Investors have been increasingly eager to buy shares of Facebook and other fast-growing but privately-held Internet social networking companies on special, secondary-market exchanges. Facebook said in January that it will exceed 500 shareholders this year, and that in accordance with SEC regulations, it will file public financial reports no later than April 30, 2012.

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LargeCap Stocks to Watch Today

Tomahawk, WI 11/4/2011 (StreetBeat) – LinkedIn posted its first quarterly loss since its May initial public offering despite revenue more than doubling during the time period.

The business social network also said it will raise up to $500 million in another stock sale.

Shares were falling 10.3% to $78.50.

Starbucks beat Wall Street profit expectations for its fiscal fourth-quarter by a penny on better-than-expected revenue. But the coffee chain gave a fiscal 2012 outlook below analysts' expectations as it expects rising commodity costs.

The stock was rising 3.9% to $43 in premarket trading.

Alcatel-Lucent, the technology company, posted improved third-quarter profit but cut its profit and sales forecasts for 2011 on uncertainty in Europe.

The stock was falling 13.4% in premarket trading to $2.39.

AIG posted its biggest quarterly loss since 2009, hurt by declining markets and an impairment charge on its plane-leasing subsidiary.

AIG also announced a plan to buyback $1 billion worth of common shares.

AIG shares were off 3.4% to $23.80.

CBS said third-quarter earnings topped analysts' expectations, but revenue, despite rising 2% to $3.37 billion, came in below forecasts.

CBS said sales benefited from new online streaming partnerships.

The stock was down less than 1% to $24.38 in premarket trading.

Google said it is altering its search algorithm to include more time sensitive, relevant content. The change, which comes as Google's usefulness as a real-time search site is challenged by Facebook and Twitter, will affect about 35% of all searches.

Google previously incorporated real-time search into its results through a partnership with Twitter, but this feature was disabled in July when the two failed to renew their contract.

The stock was down 49 cents to $597.01.

Bank of New York Mellon is negotiating with federal prosecutors to resolve a civil suit over currency trades that could pave the way to settlements of $2 billion in lawsuits, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Earnings reports are expected from Berkshire Hathaway and KKR.

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Linkedin Making Waves

Tomahawk, WI 5/19/2011 (PennyPayDay) -- There was an unmistakable echo of the dot-com boom Thursday on Wall Street.

LinkedIn, a trailblazer in the online networking craze, went public with a roaring stock offering. Within minutes, shares were trading at twice the value set by the company.

Buyers crowded the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and financial news networks flashed LinkedIn's stock price urgently all day. By the closing bell, the company had a market value of $9 billion, the highest for any Internet company since Google had its initial public offering seven years ago. Millionaires and even one billionaire were made, at least on paper.

The stock, issued at $45, went as high as $122.70 just before noon and closed at $94.25 on a trading volume of 30 million shares. All this for a company that skeptics say amounts to an online Rolodex, a place on the Internet for professionals to post resumes and connect with one another and potential employers.

It was enough to remind some people on Wall Street of the heady late 1990s and the debuts of companies like Netscape Communications -- and, more infamously, long-forgotten names like Pets.com and Webvan. Investors wondered whether LinkedIn will be a precursor to another financial frenzy in Silicon Valley.

"I definitely think this will be a catalyst," said longtime technology investor and analyst Michael Moe, CEO of Global Silicon Valley Asset Management. "Investors who like growth stocks have been stuck in a desert for a long time, and now it's like they have found this great pitcher of water."

LinkedIn is already worth $9 billion, or 18 times its projected revenue this year. Major Internet companies, including Google, trade at an average of about five times projected revenue, according to an analysis by Capital IQ.

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LinkedIn IPO Priced at $42-$45 per Share

Oxford, MS 5/17/2011 (PennyPayDay) -- LinkedIn Corp, which runs a social network for professionals, said the pricing of its initial public offering was increased by 30 percent, as investors clamour to ride the social networking wave.

The new pricing range of $42-$45 per share, up from a previously expected $32-$35, values the 9-year old company at a little over $4 billion.

At about 17 times LinkedIn's 2010 revenue, the IPO is still cheap compared with 78 times for Renren Inc, the Chinese site often likened to Facebook and which made a successful U.S. debut earlier this month.

LinkedIn doubled its revenue last year to $243.1 million and posted a net income of $15.4 million.

Companies like Facebook, Twitter, Groupon and Zynga have whetted investor appetite and made social media one of the hottest sectors around. Their shares, traded in markets for private investors, command multi-billion-dollar valuations.

On its debut, Renren soared 29 percent, but the stock has since dropped to below its IPO price amid investor apprehension over accounting issues and fears of China's strict regulations.

Of the 7.84 million shares LinkedIn is offering, 4.83 million will come from the company and the rest from some of its stockholders.

Shares owned by LinkedIn co-founder and ex-PayPal executive Reid Hoffman, who is among those stockholders selling shares in the IPO, would represent about 21.7 percent of voting power after the offering.

Other big stakeholders offering shares include Goldman Sachs, McGraw-Hill Companies Inc and Bain Capital Venture Integral Investors LLC.

Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and JPMorgan are among the bookrunners for the LinkedIn IPO.

(Reporting by Sweta Singh in Bangalore; Editing by Jarshad Kakkrakandy and Ian Geoghegan)

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