Twitter hopes to raise $1bn in IPO, despite lack of profit

Investors will be wary of the social media firm's financials, as well as a succession of internet IPO flops

Twitter, one of the most popular social media websites in the world, is hoping to raise about $1bn (£619m) at its initial public offering (IPO) later this year.

The firm revealed the target on Thursday, when it made public its pre-IPO S-1 filing which was filed in September. The filing revealed that Twitter had made a loss of $69m in the first six months of 2013, on revenues of $253m.

This reveals a trend for the social network, as it enjoyed revenues of $316m in 2012, but made an overall loss of $80m. This proves that the company has been climbing an upward slope in terms of revenues, but has never made a profit.

Twitter's IPO is highly anticipated, but investors may be cautious after Facebook's IPO in May 2012, which started at $38 a share and steadily decreased, falling to about $18 in September last year.

In the filing, Twitter explained that its user growth rate is likely to slow over time - it had 218 million monthly users in June this year.

It warned investors that thereafter: "Our revenue growth will become increasingly dependent on our ability to increase levels of user engagement, as measured by timeline views and timeline views per monthly active users, and monetisation as measured by advertising revenue per timeline view".

It also warned that there are risks related to the [internet and technology] industry Twitter inhabits. It claimed that growth and engagement could slow if "users engage with other products, services or activities as an alternative to ours". It would also be affected by user experience diminishing through technical issues or prominence of advertising, or with security factors arising.

About 500 million tweets are sent a day, but growth would slow if "there is a decrease in the perceived quality of the content generated by our users", the company said.

Last year, Facebook was not helped by NASDAQ's technical glitch during its IPO and secondary market trading - something the stock exchange has had to pay a $10m penalty for - but Twitter is yet to announce where it will list, but did state that it will use the ticker "TWTR".

Twitter will look to break the current mould of internet firms that have suffered post-IPO blues including retail couponing firm Groupon, whose share price has plummeted from $26.11 on the first day of trading to only $11.30 at the time of writing, and gaming firm Zynga, whose shares have slumped from $9.50 to $3.69.

In contrast, enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) firms such as Eloqua, ServiceNow and Workday have been a hit with investors in the past few years.