NEW YORK — Hoping to harvest some fresh cash, the online-game company behind FarmVille said Friday that it plans to raise $1 billion in an initial public offering of up to 100 million shares.
Zynga is the latest in a spate of IPOs by Internet companies this year, including the professional networking service LinkedIn and the online-deals site Groupon. They’re all precursors to Facebook’s public debut, expected sometime after April next year. Facebook could fetch as much as $10 billion in its offering.
Zynga, whose games are played mainly on Facebook, plans to sell its shares at $8.50 to $10 each. If the shares are priced at $10, Zynga will be valued at $7 billion based on the number of its total shares. That’s a smaller valuation than the company’s shares have traded recently on SharesPost, a secondary stock exchange used to trade the stock of privately held companies. There, a recent trade valued Zynga at $11.7 billion.
