Twitter Files for an IPO

By Tim Bradshaw in San Francisco and Arash Massoudi in New York

Twitter has fired the starting gun on the internet’s most anticipated initial public offering since Facebook by filing its preparatory documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

The messaging site revealed its S1 filing in a tweet at 2pm Pacific time. 

“We’ve confidentially submitted an S1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale,” Twitter said from its official feed, sending the site’s users into an immediate frenzy of speculation.

A second tweet said simply: “Now back to work”, showing a picture of Twitter’s San Francisco offices. 

By submitting a filing under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups, or Jobs Act, Twitter will be taking advantage of a US law signed last year by President Barack Obama intended to induce more companies to tap the country’s public markets. Specifically, companies with less than $1bn in annual revenues can keep their securities filings confidential until three weeks before the launch of an investor roadshow.

Twitter was valued at around $10bn in private transactions earlier this year, including a stock sale to fund manager BlackRock. 

The move comes after Facebook’s stock hit a new all-time high earlier this week, breaking above the $45 mark against the $38 at which they were offered in May 2012.

In preliminary discussions with Wall Street bankers in recent months, Twitter has stressed that it wants to make its IPO a much more low-key affair, to avoid the kind of hype that contributed to Facebook’s high-priced offering. 

A Twitter spokesman declined to comment beyond the company’s posting. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013.