Facebook founder & Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's Launches '' open compute program '' at Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto, California, April 7, 2011.
Credit: Reuters/Norbert von der GroebenBy Lauren Tara LaCapra and Jennifer SabaNEW YORK | Thu 28 april 2011, 9: 23 am EDT
NEW YORK (Reuters)-a group of Facebook shareholders want to offload of $ 1 billion of shares on the secondary market, a sale that the company more than 70 billion dollars, would value according to five sources with direct knowledge of the situation.
It would be one of the largest transactions of Facebook shares represent to date and points to a growing wariness among novice investors and workers who are afraid of Facebook's growth cannot keep pace with the market value.
The sellers have their price lowered after previously trying to get rid of shares at a price which the company 90 billion dollars, which would make Facebook more valuable than Time Warner Inc. and News Corp combined appreciated. But buyers balked.
"On the current valuation where it is, it's really hard to justify the investment," said Sumeet Jain, a partner at venture capital firm CMEA capital, which has investigated Facebook recently and has taken a pass. "It's hard to imagine that it will change in a company with 270 billion dollars in the next couple years."
The current agreement, which stock held by Facebook employees, is awaiting approval of top managers Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman, including according to two sources.
Facebook declined to comment.
Investors, ranging from venture capital firms to rich individuals to investment banks, have scrambled to get a piece of the private company before the expected IPO next year.
Facebook raised $ 500 million from Goldman Sachs Group, Russia's Digital Sky technologies and, for example, giving it a market value of $ 50 billion. Weeks later, private equity firm General Atlantic piled up in the company, valuing $ 65 billion, according to CNBC.
Tim Draper, the well-known venture capital partner that Draper Fisher Jurvetson founded, told Reuters this month he looked recently on buying shares of Facebook offers, but because of an unattractive appreciation.
A rich person, who has fielded calls for the past month with Facebook pitches in the range of $ 200 million to 1 billion dollars, is also sitting on the sidelines.
"The priced to perfection in the private market," said the person, who did not want to be named. The person said that the pitches implied a valuation of $ 90 billion. "I not everything which I now can't sell themselves."
Created in a dormitory of Harvard University in 2004, up Facebook from an online directory for students om's world's number 1 social network with more than 500 million members worldwide.
The amazing growth of the company and its popularity have some of the biggest guns of the Internet on notice--including Google--and it has become the darling of investors seeking to stake out claims in private companies before they go public.
Facebook, nr. 1 Internet social network of the world, earned $ 355 million in net income in the first nine months of 2010, on revenue of $ 1.2 billion.
It is one of a handful of internet companies including Twitter, Groupon and Zynga whose rising valuations the heady days of the late 1990s.
It is questionable whether new investors would realize the exponential growth that the novice investors got into Facebook, said Oppenheimer & Co Managing Director Stephen Todd Walker.
This is particularly true, he said, as the company faced with more competition abroad of China's social networking sites like Renren Inc., which is expected to go public next week.
"For Facebook, the larger you get, the harder it is to that explosive growth," said Walker.
However, an array of investors has piled in Facebook. Mutual fund giant t. Rowe Price recently announced that several of its funds ownership stakes in Facebook, valuing the company at $ 25 per share, implying a valuation of $ 50 billion.
Another hedge fund manager who deals on smaller Facebook recently passed said that for him, the opportunity to get in on the action was over.
"By the time t. Rowe Price is investing," he said, "you know that it is too late."
(Additional reporting by Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco; Edit by Kenneth Li, Steve Orlofsky and Robert MacMillan)
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