Denver is on the shortlist of stops for Facebook’s 10-day roadshow hyping its initial public offering, one of the most anticipated stock offerings ever.
Executives from the social-networking giant are slated to present to investors in Denver on Tuesday, according to a schedule obtained by investment advisory website IPO Boutique that was provided to The Denver Post.
A Facebook spokeswoman Tuesday declined to comment about the roadshow, which kicked off this week in New York and will span a half-dozen cities, including Boston, Chicago and Menlo Park, Calif.
A separate schedule from PrivCo, a provider of financial data on private companies, lists a Tuesday breakfast stop in Kansas City, Mo., and a lunch stop in Denver. The exact location in Denver will be announced privately to invitees the day before.
Presentations are slated to wrap up May 17, with the IPO on tap for May 18.
It isn’t certain that Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who arrived at the New York event wearing a hoodie and jeans, will make an appearance in Denver.
Denver beat out several much larger cities — such as Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta — for a spot on the tour, but local money managers said that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
A heavy concentration of growth mutual funds — Janus, Founders, Berger and Invesco — made Cherry Creek a must-stop for corporate executives pitching their stock in the 1990s, said Fred Taylor, president of Northstar Investment Advisors in Denver.
And while the tech bust a decade ago thinned the ranks of those funds, not to mention the limousines coming to pay homage, Janus Capital Group and the Marsico Funds apparently still hold enough sway to draw in a Facebook, he said.
Janus representatives and the Facebook team are expected to meet before the company goes public, although a Janus spokeswoman wasn’t certain whether that meeting would be in Denver or elsewhere because of travel schedules.
Up to this point, Zuckerberg reportedly has been a reluctant participant in the roadshow and skipped the main presentation at the Four Seasons in Boston on Tuesday, although he met privately with Fidelity Investments, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and chief financial officer David Ebersman handled the heavy lifting in Zuckerberg’s absence.
“The offering is going to be a circus,” predicts Brian Barish, a Denver money manager who said it was unlikely he would buy shares for his firm, Cambiar Investors.
Besides mutual funds, some of Denver’s hedge funds are expected to get in on the offering for a quick trade in shares that are expected to rise rapidly in the first day of trading.
The city also has a good regional representation among some of the underwriters, big and small, who are bringing the stock to market.
Those firms include J.P. Morgan Securities, Morgan Stanley & Co., RBC Capital Markets, Wells Fargo Securities, and Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. Inc.
Brokerage firms are jockeying to land shares for their deep-pocketed clients, but Zuckerberg has also requested that a significant block of Facebook shares be set aside for average retail investors via online brokers E-Trade, TD Ameritrade and Charles Schwab.
Facebook is looking to raise $10.6 billion from the public by selling shares at a price range of $28 to $35. In dollars raised, the offering would rank among the five largest in the past 15 years, according to data from Bloomberg.
Measured in terms of the total market value of a company at the time it went public, Facebook would set a record at $96 billion, handily beating the $67 billion market value UPS had when it went public in 1999, according to Dealogic.
Off the bat, Facebook, which got its start in 2004, would have a market value comparable to McDonald’s and greater than Walt Disney Co. and Kraft Foods, companies that took decades to build.
Facebook allows users to create free online profiles and share photos, stories and other content with friends and family. Businesses use the site to interact with customers. The social network is approaching 1 billion users worldwide. The vast majority of its revenue comes from advertising.
“Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected,” Zuckerberg said in the company’s 30-minute online video pitch to investors.
