Facebook on Tuesday watched as its shares plummeted below $30 to a new low of $29.44, a difference of more than 20% from its $38 IPO.
As of 12:45pm EDT the company’s shares had reached there lowest price to date while Dan Gallagher at MarketWatch points out that the company’s valuation is still extremely generous at 55 times its estimated earnings for the fiscal year.
In comparison Google trades at approximately 14 times estimated earnings while Apple, Microsoft and other tech firms fall inside the same Google range.
In the meantime social networking sites have managed to rack up huge valuations with Groupon trading at 64 times estimated earnings and LinkedIn destroying the competition with a trading value of 145 times estimated earnings.
Losing money for many social type networks doesn’t even seem to matter, while Yelp is projected to have loses the company’s P/E ratio is still sitting just below 200.
Investors have pulled back their Facebook share interest after the company became engulfed in controversy over claims of selective disclosure about slowing revenue growth in the days leading up to the social networks IPO.
Since the Facebook IPO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal fortune has declined by $3 billion, then again when your personal wealth jumped to $20 billion overnight a fortune of $17 billion is still not a bad haul.
Facebook, Nasdaq and their trading partners now face lawsuits from investors who were immediately angered after the exchange botched the first day of trading.
Do you think Facebook will soon bottom out or is the social network still extremely overvalued at $29.44?