In a surprising move on Monday, Twitter decided to raise the starting price of its initial public offering into the $23-$25 range. This is a significant increase from its previous $17-$20 pricing and would give the company a $13.9 billion evaluation!
The move, which was likely made in response to great potential demand for the stock, will allow Twitter to raise up to $2 billion through selling shares, up from $1.6 billion previously, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Twitter is expected to release its IPO for trading later this week.
Also in Twitter’s latest filing, it disclosed a letter received from IBM that accuses Twitter of three patent infringements, including an advertising methodology. You can read text from the amended S-1 below:
From time to time we receive claims from third parties which allege that we have infringed upon their intellectual property rights. In this regard, we recently received a letter from International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM, alleging that we infringe on at least three U.S. patents held by IBM, and inviting us to negotiate a business resolution of the allegations. The three patents specifically identified by IBM in the letter were U.S. Patent No. 6,957,224: Efficient retrieval of uniform resource locators, U.S. Patent No. 7,072,849: Method for presenting advertising in an interactive service and U.S. Patent No. 7,099,862: Programmatic discovery of common contacts. Based upon our preliminary review of these patents, we believe we have meritorious defenses to IBM’s allegations, although there can be no assurance that we will be successful in defending against these allegations or reaching a business resolution that is satisfactory to us. Further, from time to time we may introduce new products and services, including in areas where we currently do not have an offering, which could increase our exposure to patent and other intellectual property claims from competitors and non-practicing entities. In addition, although our standard terms and conditions for our Promoted Products and public APIs do not provide advertisers and platform partners with indemnification for intellectual property claims against them, some of our agreements with advertisers, platform partners and data partners require us to indemnify them for certain intellectual property claims against them, which could require us to incur considerable costs in defending such claims, and may require us to pay significant damages in the event of an adverse ruling. Such advertisers, platform partners and data partners may also discontinue use of our products, services and technologies as a result of injunctions or otherwise, which could result in loss of revenue and adversely impact our business.”
Do you think Twitter is worth the extra coinage?
