Facebook’s stock reached a new low on Friday, closing at $18.06. The company has lost more than $50 billion in market value in three months after the offering that’s more than what Lehman Brothers gave up in the entire year before it filed for bankruptcy.
It is not talked much but if there is one single individual more responsible than any other for the stunning mispricing of Facebook’s I.P.O., it is Ebersman. He signed off at $38 after the company had originally planned a price range of $29 to $34. Also he pushed to 25 percent more shares than initially planned.
Ebersman seems to have poorly misjudged the demand for Facebook’s I.P.O. aided by errant advice from banking advisers like Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs who all had an incentive to sell as many shares as possible at the highest price possible. This wasn’t a traditional I.P.O. and should never have been priced that way.
This not at all suggests that Ebersman is dumb or unqualified. He is bright and a graduate of Brown who was the chief financial officer of Genentech when he was just 34. He was recruited to Facebook by Ms. Sandberg that was considered quite an achievement at the time. He is also responsible for negotiating favorable and extraordinarily large credit lines — $8 billion worth — with Wall Street banks, which could provide the company with an important lifeline if the economy and the company’s fortunes suffer.
According to Richard Peterson of Capital IQ, 67 percent of technology companies whose shares lagged their I.P.O. price after 90 days were still laggards after a year. So Ebersman certainly has his work cut out for him. And he is doing that fairly trying to regain the trust of shareholders. He recently came to New York to meet with big investors, including hedge funds and institutional investors. Until Facebook’s stock rebounds, Mr. Ebersman will be feeling the pressure.
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