By Shira Ovide
- Bloomberg News
Take a deep breath. Kate Kelly at CNBC is reporting fresh details on the planned IPO of Zynga, the maker of popular Facebook games like FarmVille. Here are the details, according to CNBC:
* Morgan Stanley, winners of big IPO duties such as LinkedIn and Groupon, has been selected as the lead underwriter for the Zynga IPO.
* The IPO could value Zynga at $15 billion to $20 billion. Gasp. In a fund raising round earlier this year, Zynga was tagged with a valuation of $10 billion.
* An IPO filing — anticipated for more than a month — could come in a week or two, and as early as Wednesday.
Confused: Unless you’re wealthy or have a brother at Morgan Stanley, you probably won’t be able to buy IPO shares. Usually those are reserved for a select group of big investors. And as for whether you should buy Zynga stock when it’s public, I’ll leave it your financial adviser to decide. But tech IPOs, particularly for hot companies everyone wants a piece of, can be high risk/high reward.
Buy? Or wait?
20 Billion? Larger than ERTS and ATVI combined! Yeah…makes great sense!
Ok Zynga is cool, selling thin air is cool (I am Greek and I know better). But at last, as Peter Drucker suggested we need real innovations that will push global economy. Financial Engineering has been the latest innovation following the Internet, and it only created Debt and Chaos.
What is Zynga’s long term contribution to the economy that can justify a $20 Billion IPO?
I’m planning to short this stock. Sure, they get a lot of users, and it is a slightly addictive game. But, have you ever really played these games? They are like the web in the 90′s – slow and full of pop-ups. Bigger and better things are coming to the world of social gaming and Zynga ain’t it.