Twitter unseals papers for initial public offering, says it hopes to raise up to $1 billion

10/3/2013

NEW YORK (AP) — Twitter has unsealed the documents for its planned initial public offering of stock and says it hopes to raise up to $1 billion.

The company is also disclosing that it generated $317 million in revenue in 2012 and that it has more than 215 million active users. That compares with Facebook’s nearly 1.2 billion and LinkedIn’s 240 million.

The company disclosed last month that it had filed confidential IPO papers to start the process of going public. On Thursday, San Francisco-based Twitter Inc. unsealed the papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Twitter’s moneymaking potential has minted the company with an estimated market value of $10 billion, based on the appraisals of venture capitalists and other early investors. The IPO could value it higher or lower.

Twitter did not say which stock exchange it plans to list its shares on, though the company said it intends to use the ticker symbol “TWTR.”

The underwriters of the offering are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, BofA Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank Securities and CODE Advisors.