LinkedIn will go public on New York Stock Exchange later this month. In order to do so, the company had to prepare a file containing its figures and valuations.
From the file sent earlier this week to the Securities and Exchange Committee, LinkedIn estimates its valuation at three billion dollars. This committee acts as a gendarme of markets across the Atlantic.
The start-up recognized in its presentation that its growth could slow down in the future but investments are being planned to increase the capacities of the site.
The professional website could even not be profitable this year. In 2010, the network registered fifteen million dollars of profits on a 243 million dollar turnover. This income was 78 million dollars in 2008 so it went up by 300% in two years, which constitutes LinkedIn main argument.
LinkedIn went past the bar of hundred million subscribers. In March 2011, they have reached the amount of 102 million accounts.
Despite of these impressive figures, certain analysts remain sceptical. LinkedIn’s business model is based on the recruitment, the marketing solutions and the “premium” accounts. It is therefore very different from the ones of websites such as Facebook or Zynga that aim at making their users consume via their interfaces.
Investors are more looking for websites that are actually doing their best to make users consume and buy. This might be a problem in the future for LinkedIn but the initial public offer it will get will for sure be a good barometer to estimate the chances of success of other social networks trying to go public.
It will be very interesting to follow LinkedIn’s evolution and from there we should be able to underline future trends. We will then see if we can fear a new “dot com bubble”….
