Twitter took the wraps off its initial public offering filling late Thursday, disclosing details about its financial condition and ownership.
Twitter's filing says it might raise as much as $1 billion by selling as many as 473 million shares, though those figures could change. Twitter announced that the filing went public with a Tweet.
In the documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Twitter said it had a net loss of $69.2 million in the first half of 2013. Revenues were $254 million. The loss grew from last year's first quarter deficit of $47 million, while revenues doubled from $122 million.
In 2012, Twitter lost $79.4 million on revenues of $316.9 million.
Twitter said the principal purposes of its IPO is to " increase our capitalization and financial flexibility, create a public market for our common stock and enable access to the public equity markets for us and our stockholders."
The company said it intends to use the proceeds of its offering for general corporate purposes. Those include working capital, operating expenses and capital expenditures. "We anticipate making capital expenditures in 2013 of approximately $225 million to $275 million, and we may use a portion of the net proceeds to fund our anticipated capital expenditures," the company said.
The company said it's not planning to pay dividends. "We currently intend to retain any future earnings and do not expect to pay any dividends in the foreseeable future," it said in the filing.
In its filing, Twitter noted that it faces "significant competition for users advertisres and personnel." The company said. "We compete against many companies to attract and engage users, some of which have greater financial resources and substantially larger user bases, such as Facebook (including Instagram), Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Yahoo!. We also compete against smaller companies such as Sina Weibo, LINE and Kakao, each of which is based in Asia."
As of June 30, 2013, Twitter had approximately 2,000 full-time employees.
Twitters biggest shareholders are co-founder Evan Williams, with 60 million share representing 12% of the company before the public offering, Peter Fenton, with 32 million shares, representing 6.7% of thse shares, co-founder Jack Dorsey, with 23 million shares or 4.9% and CEO Richard Costolo, with 8 million shares or 1.6%. Also owning more than 5% are Rizvi Traverse, Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital Partners, Union Square Ventures and DST Gobil.
CEO Richard Costolo made 11.5 million in total compensation last in 2012. Chief engineer Christopher Fry made $10.3 milion and president of global revenue Adam Bain made $6.7 million
