Facebook Tumble, blame game begin !

Investors fault everything

Let the Facebook Inc. (FB) finger-pointing begin.



After one of the most anticipated initial public offeringsin history, Facebook’s 19 percent drop this week prompted investors to fault everything from Morgan Stanley’s role as lead underwriter, to the company’s greed and the Nasdaq Stock Market.

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People walk by the Nasdaq stock market in New York, on May 18, 2012. Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

 

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May 22 (Bloomberg) -- Jeff Corbin, chief  executive officer of KCSA Strategic Communications, talks about the 19 percent decline in Facebook Inc.'s shares following the company's initial public offering. Corbin speaks with Mark Crumpton on Bloomberg Television's "Bottom Line." (Source: Bloomberg) 

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May 21 (Bloomberg) -- Paul Kedrosky, author of the Infectious Greed blog and a Bloomberg contributing editor, and Max Wolff, an analyst at Greencrest Capital Management, talk about trading in shares of Facebook Inc. Facebook fell below its $38 offer price in the second day of trading. Kedrosky and Wolff speak with Emily Chang on Bloomberg Television's "Bloomberg West." (Source: Bloomberg) 

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May 21 (Bloomberg) -- Darren Chervitz, research director for Jacob Funds, talks about Facebook Inc.'s stock price performance and the outlook for the social network firm. Facebook, the social networking site that raised $16 billion in an initial public offering, fell below its $38 offer price in its second trading day. Chervitz speaks with Trish Regan on Bloomberg Television's "InBusiness." (Source: Bloomberg) 

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May 22 (Bloomberg) -- Bloomberg's Dominic Chu reports that after one of the most anticipated initial public offerings in history, Facebook’s 11 percent drop on Monday prompted investors to fault everything from Morgan Stanley’s role as lead underwriter, to the company’s greed and the Nasdaq Stock Market. He speaks on Bloomberg Television's "Inisde Track." (Source: Bloomberg) 

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May 22 (Bloomberg) -- Cliff Lerner, chief executive officer of Snap Interactive Inc., talks about the impact of the drop in Facebook Inc.’s shares on Snap's stock. Lerner talks with Trish Regan on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness.” (Source: Bloomberg) 

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The Facebook Inc. logo is displayed at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, on May 18, 2012. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg 

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A pedestrian walks past the share price for Facebook Inc. displayed at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, U.S., on Monday, May 21, 2012. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg

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Facebook Inc. Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman, seen here, was the point person on the deal, while Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg weighed in on major decisions throughout the process, people said. Photographer: Tony Avelar/Bloomberg 

“It was like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” said Michael Mullaney, who helps manage $9.5 billion as chief investment officer at Fiduciary Trust in Boston. He said he placed Facebook orders for clients. “The underwriters mis- estimated what actual demand was, and there was pure execution failure coming out of the Nasdaq.”

Taking the most heat is Morgan Stanley, said Mullaney. The bank was lead underwriter among the 33 firms Facebook hired to manage the $16 billion sale of stock. The bank decided with Facebook executives to boost the size and price days before the May 17 IPO, ignoring advice from some co-managers, said people with knowledge of the matter, who declined to be identified because the process was private. Morgan Stanley (MS) talked with few of its fellow underwriters aside from JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) throughout the IPO, one person said.

“They overplayed the enthusiasm and probably just misread the atmosphere of the marketplace,” said Keith Wirtz, who oversees $15 billion as chief investment officer at Fifth Third Asset Management in Cincinnati and bought some stock in the IPO.

Blame Game

Facebook increased the number of shares being sold in the IPO by 25 percent last week to 421.2 million and raised its asking price to a range of $34 to $38 from $28 to $35. Had Facebook kept the original terms, investors may have had a better shot at a first-day pop. Instead, the stock was little changed in its debut because Morgan Stanley intervened to prevent it from falling below the IPO price.

The shares fell 8.9 percent to $31 at the close today, after an 11 percent drop yesterday.

Just days before Facebook raised the size and price of its IPO, the company began telling analysts to lower their sales forecasts, people familiar with the matter said. Morgan Stanley analysts were among those who cut their projections during the roadshow, said one person. The move also followed a May 9 filing in which Facebook said advertising growth hasn’t kept pace with the increase in users.

Investors Misled?

Some investors say they felt misled by the underwriters. According to one London-based fund manager who asked not to be named, bankers indicated demand was so strong that he placed a bigger order than he thought he would get, leaving him with 40 percent more Facebook shares than anticipated. He sold most of that stock on the first day of trading.

The decision to boost the price range reflected the demand in the market, said a person involved in the process. Michael DuVally, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, and Pen Pendleton, a spokesman for Morgan Stanley, declined to comment. Jennifer Zuccarelli, a spokeswoman for JPMorgan, declined to comment. Underwriters didn’t say how great demand was.

Morgan Stanley and Facebook consider problems with Nasdaq OMX Group Inc.’s computer systems among the reasons for the IPO’s performance so far, according to people familiar with the matter. Nasdaq’s trading platform was overwhelmed by order cancellations and updates that made the stock-market operator unable to finish the auction required to open trading. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said it will review the trading.

Nasdaq Software 

Nasdaq Chief Executive Officer Robert Greifeld said on a call with reporters on May 20 about the glitch that the opening delay “had no apparent impact on the stock price,” noting the share decline began after all brokers had received confirmation about their trades in the opening auction. Robert Madden, a spokesman for Nasdaq OMX, declined to comment beyond Greifeld’s statement.

Nasdaq said in a notice yesterday it delivered all outstanding execution and cancellation messages to brokers for their IPO cross orders at 1:50 p.m. Facebook declined 5.9 percent after 1:50 p.m.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the early backers should be held accountable for the stock drop, said Francis Gaskins, president of researcher IPOdesktop.com in Marina Del Rey, California. Goldman Sachs, Accel Partners, Digital Sky Technologies and other existing holders boosted the number of IPO shares they offered in Facebook on May 16, a day after the company increased its price range.

‘Mispriced’ Market Value 

 

 “It’s a combination of Zuckerberg’s ego for that $100 billion market cap, and the shareholders selling who wanted an exit,” said Gaskins. “Somehow it just missed them that this was mispriced.”

Larry Yu, a spokesman for Menlo Park, California-based Facebook, declined to comment. Rich Wong, a partner at Palo Alto-based Accel Partners, and Yuri Milner, founder of Digital Sky Technologies in Moscow, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Facebook Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman was the point person on the deal, while Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg weighed in on major decisions throughout the process, people said. At Morgan Stanley, Dan Simkowitz, chairman of global capital markets, was one of the main bankers on the offering. Michael Grimes, global co-head of technology investment banking at Morgan Stanley, also played a key role.

Underwriters did accomplish part of what they set out to do: turn paper into cash for pre-IPO holders.
“It was successful for the liquidating owners, absolutely, because they got all that and then some,” said Peter Sorrentino, a fund manager who helps oversee $14.7 billion at Huntington Asset Advisors in Cincinnati.

For the investors it was a different story.

“I shame the people who were lining up to buy the thing,” said Sorrentino, whose firm didn’t buy stock in the IPO and tried to talk clients out of purchases. “The financials were there, do the math. Everyone wanted to be caught up in the glamour offering of the year. People just had stars in their eyes.”  - Bloomberg

By Serena Saitto, Lee Spears and Joseph Ciolli - May 23, 2012 4:17 AM GMT+0800 

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Facebook price falls !

(Reuters) - Facebook's shares fell again on Tuesday, leaving them down more than a quarter from Friday's highs as questions mounted over the company's financial prospects and its ability to grow fast enough to live up to the hype surrounding its stock.

After Friday's nearly flat close and Monday's 11 percent plunge, the stock dropped as much as 9 percent in early trading on Tuesday before reversing some of the decline.

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 Facebook shares were down 4 percent at $32.70 just after midday. Volume was again heavy, with more than 66 million shares traded. That followed turnover of 168 million shares Monday and 581 million on IPO day.

"There was a quick rush to exit yesterday, and when it broke the deal price it became self-fulfilling that there was going to (be) additional pressure. That's continuing today even though there's no real news on it," said Michael James, a senior trader at regional investment bank Wedbush Morgan in Los Angeles.

Investors were still shaking their heads over the botched opening trading of Facebook when Reuters reported late Monday that the consumer Internet analyst at lead underwriter Morgan Stanley cut his revenue forecasts for Facebook in the days before the offering.

JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, which were also underwriters on the deal, each revised its estimates during the road show as well, according to sources familiar with the situation.

One mutual fund source said they had never, in a decade of experience, seen an underwriter cut a company's outlook during the road show prior to an offering.

Brokers, who over-ordered shares expecting supply would be limited, continued to complain they received too much stock to handle. Meanwhile some retail investors were already consulting lawyers.

STILL OVERVALUED?

As bad as the declines have been, a view persists that the stock remains overvalued.

With Monday's closing price of $34.03, the market implied a 24 percent annual growth rate for earnings over the next 10 years -- a rate that would rank above 90 percent of the companies in that industry.

Thomson Reuters Starmine, meanwhile, more conservatively estimates a 10.8 percent annual growth rate, which would value the stock at $9.59 a share, a 72 percent discount to its IPO price of $38.

Similarly, the company's price-to-earnings ratio remains lofty, even after the selloff. The $34.03 price implies a forward P/E of 59, compared with Google's 13.3 forward price-to-earnings ratio (for a similar rate of growth).

TASKMASTER

Investors said the challenge for the young company is to prove it can grow aggressively, to justify its lofty valuation and demonstrate its maturity.

"Wall Street is a severe taskmaster and they're going to want to see quarterly results, then guidance, then subsequently they're going to want to see that guidance beaten, and then the guidance raised," David Rolfe, chief investment officer of Wedgewood Partners, said on Monday evening.

Besides the pressure on Facebook, there is also an intense focus on Nasdaq, which has shouldered much of the blame for trading failures last Friday. The exchange has already set aside money to compensate customers, but some on Wall Street are warning its ability to snag future big IPOs is at risk.

Barry Ritholtz, a widely followed financial blogger and the chief market strategist at Fusion IQ in New York, took all sides -- Facebook, Morgan Stanley and Nasdaq -- to task in the sharpest terms on his blog Tuesday.

"Thus, what we see are a series of bad decisions made by Facebook's executives going back many years. The insiders got greedy, too clever by half, in how they used secondary markets. They picked a bad banker and an awful exchange," Ritholtz said.

 By Edward Krudy and Ryan Vlastelica



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The Facebook Fallacy 

The Facebook Fallacy

For all its valuation, the social network is just another ad-supported site. Without an earth-changing idea, it will collapse and take down the Web.

Flickr Creative Commons Tanaka Juuyoh and Cambodia4kids.org Beth Kanter

Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it.

Given its vast cash reserves and the glacial pace of business reckonings, that will sound hyperbolic. But that doesn't mean it isn't true.

At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media. Facebook, with its 900 million users, valuation of around $100 billion, and the bulk of its business in traditional display advertising, is now at the heart of the heart of the fallacy.

The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency. The nature of people's behavior on the Web and of how they interact with advertising, as well as the character of those ads themselves and their inability to command real attention, has meant a marked decline in advertising's impact.

At the same time, network technology allows advertisers to more precisely locate and assemble audiences outside of branded channels. Instead of having to go to CNN for your audience, a generic CNN-like audience can be assembled outside CNN's walls and without the CNN-brand markup. This has resulted in the now famous and cruelly accurate formulation that $10 of offline advertising becomes $1 online.

I don't know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn't engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn't manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value.

Facebook, however, has convinced large numbers of otherwise intelligent people that the magic of the medium will reinvent advertising in a heretofore unimaginably profitable way, or that the company will create something new that isn't advertising, which will produce even more wonderful profits. But at a forward profit-to-earnings ratio of 56 (as of the close of trading on May 21), these innovations will have to be something like alchemy to make the company worth its sticker price. For comparison, Google trades at a forward P/E ratio of 12. (To gauge how much faith investors have that Google, Facebook, and other Web companies will extract value from their users, see our recent chart.)

Facebook currently derives 82 percent of its revenue from advertising. Most of that is the desultory ticky-tacky kind that litters the right side of people's Facebook profiles. Some is the kind of sponsorship that promises users further social relationships with companies: a kind of marketing that General Motors just announced it would no longer buy.

Facebook's answer to its critics is: pay no attention to the carping. Sure, grunt-like advertising produces the overwhelming portion of our $4 billion in revenues; and, yes, on a per-user basis, these revenues are in pretty constant decline, but this stuff is really not what we have in mind. Just wait.

It's quite a juxtaposition of realities. On the one hand, Facebook is mired in the same relentless downward pressure of falling per-user revenues as the rest of Web-based media. The company makes a pitiful and shrinking $5 per customer per year, which puts it somewhat ahead of the Huffington Post and somewhat behind the New York Times' digital business. (Here's the heartbreaking truth about the difference between new media and old: even in the New York Times' declining traditional business, a subscriber is still worth more than $1,000 a year.) Facebook's business only grows on the unsustainable basis that it can add new customers at a faster rate than the value of individual customers declines. It is peddling as fast as it can. And the present scenario gets much worse as its users increasingly interact with the social service on mobile devices, because it is vastly harder, on a small screen, to sell ads and profitably monetize users.

On the other hand, Facebook is, everyone has come to agree, profoundly different from the Web. First of all, it exerts a new level of hegemonic control over users' experiences. And it has its vast scale: 900 million, soon a billion, eventually two billion (one of the problems with the logic of constant growth at this scale and speed, of course, is that eventually it runs out of humans with computers or smart phones). And then it is social. Facebook has, in some yet-to-be-defined way, redefined something. Relationships? Media? Communications? Communities? Something big, anyway.

The subtext—an overt subtext—of the popular account of Facebook is that the network has a proprietary claim and special insight into social behavior. For enterprises and advertising agencies, it is therefore the bridge to new modes of human connection.

Expressed so baldly, this account is hardly different from what was claimed for the most aggressively boosted companies during the dot-com boom. But there is, in fact, one company that created and harnessed a transformation in behavior and business: Google. Facebook could be, or in many people's eyes should be, something similar. Lost in such analysis is the failure to describe the application that will drive revenues.

Google is an incredibly efficient system for placing ads. In a disintermediated advertising market, the company has turned itself into the last and ultimate middleman. On its own site, it controls the space where a buyer searches for a thing and where a seller hawks that thing (its keywords AdWords network). Google is also the cheapest, most efficient way to place ads anywhere on the Web (the AdSense network). It's not a media company in any traditional sense; it's a facilitator. It can forget the whole laborious, numbing process of selling advertising space: if a marketer wants to place an ad (that is, if it is already convinced it must advertise), the company calls Mr. Google.

And that's Facebook's hope, too: like Google, it wants to be a facilitator, the inevitable conduit at the center of the world's commerce.

Facebook has the scale, the platform, and the brand to be the new Google. It only lacks the big idea. Right now, it doesn't actually know how to embed its usefulness into world commerce (or even, really, what its usefulness is).

But Google didn't have the big idea at the company's founding, either. The search engine borrowed the concept of AdWords from Yahoo's Overture network (with a lawsuit for patent infringement and settlement following). Now Google has all the money in the world to buy or license all the ideas that could makes its scale, platform, and brand pay off.

What might Facebook's big idea look like? Well, it does have all this data. The company knows so much about so many people that its executives are sure that the knowledge must have value (see "You Are the Ad," by Robert D. Hof, May/June 2011).

If you're inside the Facebook galaxy (a constellation that includes an ever-expanding cloud of associated ventures) there is endless chatter about a near-utopian (but often quasi-legal or demi-ethical) new medium of marketing. "If we just ... if only ... when we will ..." goes the conversation. If, for instance, frequent-flyer programs and travel destinations actually knew when you were thinking about planning a trip. Really we know what people are thinking about—sometimes before they know! If a marketer could identify the person who has the most influence on you ... If a marketer could introduce you to someone who would relay the marketer's message ... get it? No ads, just friends! My God!

But so far, the sweeping, basic, transformative, and simple way to connect buyer to seller and then get out of the way eludes Facebook.

So the social network is left in the same position as all other media companies. Instead of being inevitable and unavoidable, it has to sell the one-off virtue of its audience like every other humper on Madison Avenue.

Here's another worrisome point: Facebook is a company of technologists, not marketers. If you wanted to bet on someone succeeding in the marketing business, you'd bet on technologists only if they could invent some new way to sell; you wouldn't bet on them to sell the way marketers have always sold.

But that's what Facebook is doing, selling individual ads. From a revenue perspective, it's an ad-sales business, not a technology company. To meet expectations—the expectations that took it public at $100 billion, the ever-more-vigilant expectations needed to sustain it at that price—it has to sell at near hyperspeed.

The growth of its user base and its ever-expanding  page views means an almost infinite inventory to sell. But the expanding supply, together with an equivocal demand, means ever-lowering costs. The math is sickeningly inevitable. Absent an earth-shaking idea, Facebook will look forward to slowing or declining growth in a tapped-out market, and ever-falling ad rates, both on the Web and (especially) in mobile. Facebook isn't Google; it's Yahoo or AOL.

Oh, yes ... In its Herculean efforts to maintain its overall growth, Facebook will continue to lower its per-user revenues, which, given its vast inventory, will force the rest of the ad-driven Web to lower its costs. The low-level panic the owners of every mass-traffic website feel about the ever-downward movement of the cost of a thousand ad impressions (or CPM) is turning to dread, as some big sites observed as much as a 25 percent decrease in the last quarter, following Facebook's own attempt to book more revenue.

You see where this is going. As Facebook gluts an already glutted market, the fallacy of the Web as a profitable ad medium can no longer be overlooked. The crash will come. And Facebook—that putative transformer of worlds, which is, in reality, only an ad-driven site—will fall with everybody else.

By Michael Wolff
Michael Wolff writes a column on media for the Guardian; is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair; founded Newser; and was, until October of last year, the editor of AdWeek
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