India in FB IPO
By Techgirl

Today, I woke up to the much hyped up, leaked news that Facebook is launching a $5 Billion IPO.  Facebook could be worth $100 Billion or more (or slightly less) and every major newspaper, TV and tech blog in the world reported every aspect of this IPO.  We learnt that Mark Zuckerberg has the largest chunk of shares and could be worth $28 Billion.  Also, that Zuckerberg has the backing of all the shareholders to do whatever he wants.  And there were details like Facebook has told SEC that their COO Sheryl Sandberg is another key person is the organization and could be worth slightly less than $1 Billion from Facebook shares alone. 

What was interesting is that of all the SEC IPO filings I have read, none had more mentions of India that Facebook’s IPO document.  The following are the mentions of India in the Facebook IPO document

-We have operations teams to provide support for our users, developers, and advertisers in four regional centers located in Menlo Park, California; Austin, Texas; Dublin, Ireland; and Hyderabad, India. We also invest in and rely on self-service tools to provide customer support to our users, developers, and advertisers.

-We compete broadly with Google’s social networking offerings, including Google+, and also with other, largely regional, social networks that have strong positions in particular countries, including Cyworld in Korea, Mixi in Japan, Orkut (owned by Google) in Brazil and India, and vKontakte in Russia.

-As of December 31, 2011, we had 845 million MAUs, an increase of 39% from December 31, 2010. We experienced growth across different geographies, with users in Brazil and India representing a key source of growth. We had 161 million MAUs in the United States as of December 31, 2011, an increase of 16% from the prior year. We had 37 million MAUs in Brazil as of December 31, 2011, an increase of 268% from the prior year. Additionally, we had 46 million MAUs in India as of December 31, 2011, an increase of 132% from the prior year.

- There are more than two billion global Internet users according to an industry source and we aim to connect all of them. We had 845 million MAUs globally with approximately 80% accessing Facebook from outside the United States as of December 31, 2011. We continue to focus on growing our user base across all geographies, including relatively less-penetrated, large markets such as Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, and South Korea.

Techgoss note:  Techgirl is a senior Tech journalist who reports on the IT, KPO and KPO Sectors for a leading media house.  In her spare time, she dabbles in satire in her blog techgirltalk.blogspot.com.  Techgirl has been ejected from Twitter for satirizing an Indian Minister.  Her satire blog has links to her Times of India interview detailing her being kicked out of Twitter, and then being invited back.