Twitter IPO at More than 26 Times Sales

San Francisco based Twitter is looking for a company valuation of more than 9.5 times its 2014 sales in its November initial public offering, according to new data in one of their filings with the SEC on Thursday.

That amount is 27% less than the 12.9 times sales for 2014 that Facebook currently is trading at and is 29% lower than the 13.4 times the LinkedIn Corp is traded at.

The amount Twitter is offering has underscored how the messaging site of just six years is working to avoid the same fate of Zynga Inc, Groupon Inc and Facebook, which all saw their value plummet by more than half within the first six months of their IPOs.

Dick Costolo, the CEO of Twitter has had a different tack from the beginning. He filed first confidentially to go public to avoid any hype of driving up the valuation prior to the IPO. Now he has priced the company at a more modest amount than some peers on the Internet. The decisions have left Twitter ready to capitalize on an investor appetite for stocks in social media.

One analyst was quick to say that Twitter has learned from the mistakes made by Facebook.

Twitter’s plan is to sell up 70 million shares or about a stake of 13% at between $17 and $20 per share to raise as much as $1.4 billion. The valuation of $10.9 billion at the upper end is based on 544.6 million common shares to be outstanding following the IPO.

The IPO would be the largest for any company on Internet since the Facebook IPO in May of 2012 that took in over $16 billion. At that time, Facebook was given a value of more than $81.3 billion. Its stock on hype went up to between $34 and $38 after it was initially looking for between $28 and $35 per share.