Valuation | featured news

Exxon Mobil briefly overtook Apple as the largest U.S. publicly traded company by market value on Friday as shares of the technology giant continued to fall.

Foursquare is having troubles convincing investors that its valuation shouldn't shrink, a sign of a cooling toward social media startups in the wake of Facebook's messy initial public offering.

Facebook shares scraped a new low
Tuesday. The new drag on the already leaden stock:
Analysts from two of Facebook’s largest
underwriters on its botched initial public
stock offering cut their price targets.

Apple is Wall Street's all-time MVP - that's Most Valuable Property. On Monday, Apple's surging stock propelled the company's value to $623 billion, the world's highest, ever. It beat the record for market capitalization set by Microsoft Corp. in the heady days of the Internet boom.

Pinterest, which allows users to share photographs, recipes and other media on custom "pinboards," raised $100 million in a funding round led by the Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten.

How to put all this into a Facebook valuation? To justify the big numbers being tossed around – $100bn and up – several things must happen in the next five to seven years. The business needs to become much less capital intensive (inclusive of acquisitions) over time, as Google and Microsoft have done. That is the easy part. But margins must also stay near today’s level of about 50 per cent – which would be uncharted territory. And sales would have to grow at least sixfold in this period.

Carlyle Group LP is eyeing a market valuation of $7.5 billion to $8 billion in an initial public offering, as the U.S. private equity firm prepares to kick off a marketing blitz to investors, perhaps as soon as next week, said a source with knowledge of the situation.

Apple, already the world's most valuable company, hit the $600 billion level for the first time Tuesday....

Shares of real-estate website Zillow more than doubled on its first day of trading, giving the unprofitable Internet company a valuation of more than $1 billion.