Facebook CEO Won’t Sell Shares for at Least a Year
Facebook Inc. (FB) Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, faced with a plummeting stock price and deluge of shares hitting the market, said he won’t start selling his holdings in the company for at least a year.
Zuckerberg has yet to adopt a share sale plan, the Menlo Park, California-based company said yesterday in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Typically, insiders use plans to pare their stakes over time to avoid flooding the market. Zuckerberg owns 444 million shares of Class B stock and 60 million shares issuable upon the exercise of an option. Facebook’s stock gained the most in two weeks.
Facebook’s shares have been marking record lows since the first share sale lockup for insiders expired in August amid concern that businesses are spending less to advertise on the world’s largest social-networking website. Even with the 53 percent plunge in the stock price since the May 17 initial public offering, Facebook still trades at 33 times earnings over the next year, compared with 14 for Apple Inc. (AAPL)
“The whole problem with the stock has been with the lockups coming up,” said Herman Leung, an analyst at Susquehanna International Group in San Francisco, who has a positive rating on the shares. The filing “offers the market a little more transparency,” he said yesterday.
Facebook rose 3.9 percent to $18.42 at 9:32 a.m. in New York, for the biggest intraday gain since Aug. 20.
Present Intention
Facebook board members Marc Andreessen and Donald Graham also said they have no “present intention” to sell shares in Facebook, other than to settle tax obligations, the filing said. Director Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook, sold more than $1 billion worth of Facebook shares in the IPO and after the end of the first lockup, a move that analysts and other venture capitalists described as “unprecedented.”
The company shortened the lockup period for certain employees, so 234 million shares will now be available for sale on Oct. 29, instead of Nov. 14. After the amendment, and accounting for the shares that Zuckerberg won’t sell, the total number freed up for sale by insiders through November will shrink to 1.01 billion from 1.44 billion previously, according to the filing.
Facebook is also spending an estimated $1.9 billion to buy back 101 million shares from early employees, instead of issuing shares to cover tax obligations. To fund the buyback, Facebook is using “our existing cash and borrowings from our credit facilities.” Facebook had $10.2 billion in cash and equivalents at the end of June.
On Aug. 16, Facebook unlocked 271.1 million shares, the first of five insider sale restrictions scheduled during its first year as a public company.
Three months earlier, Zuckerberg sold 30.2 million shares Facebook for $1.15 billion at the offering. Most of the proceeds will be used to pay taxes associated with exercising 60 million stock options.
To contact the reporter on this story: Ari Levy in San Francisco at alevy5@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says in Filing Won’t Sell Shares for Year
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg will not sell his stock holdings in the company for at least a year, according to a regulatory filing.
Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg will not sell his stock holdings in the company for at least a year, according to a regulatory filing. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Sept. 4 (Bloomberg) – Ezra Palmer, editorial director at EMarketer Inc, talks about the market researcher's sales outlook for Facebook Inc. and the growth prospects for the social network. Palmer speaks with Betty Liu on Bloomberg Television’s “In the Loop.” (Source: Bloomberg)
Sept. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Tom Forte, an analyst at Telsey Advisory Group, talks about the outlook for Facebook Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. He speaks with Tom Keene and Sara Eisen on Bloomberg Television's "Surveillance." (Source: Bloomberg)
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