One of the world's largest advertising holdings, Interpublic Group, sold half of its stake in Facebook for $133 million. Based on this, the value of the entire social network is estimated at $66.5 billion.

As the Financial Times reports, citing knowledgeable sources, one of the world's four largest advertising holdings, Interpublic Group (IPG), bought a stake in Facebook in 2006, when the capitalization of this social network was $1-2 billion. Interpublic then paid $5 million , buying just under 0.5% of Facebook shares and committing to invest another $10 million in advertising. At that time, Facebook had about 12 million users. And in April of this year, in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), IPG reported that the value of its stake in Facebook exceeded $200 million.

On Monday, IPG announced it was selling about half of that stake in Facebook. The exact size of the stake being sold is not indicated, but as IPG CEO Michael Roth indicated in his statement, they will earn about $133 million from the sale. Explaining the reasons for the sale, Mr. Roth noted that since the purchase of the stake, “Facebook has become part of the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world.” to the world." “And because it has now become ubiquitous, the strategic value of our original investment has diminished somewhat, while the value of the share in financial terms has increased significantly. Therefore, as soon as a profitable opportunity presented itself to sell part of our share, we decided that this was what we should do,” said Mr. Roth.

Thus, assuming that IPG sells less than half of its approximately 0.4% stake for $133 million, the value of all of Facebook, which now has more than 750 million users, can be estimated at approximately $66.5 billion. IPG to the SEC on Monday did not name the buyer of the stake. And according to Financial Times sources, the buyer of Facebook shares is not the social network itself, which is preparing to hold an IPO next year. Interpublic will invest the proceeds in repurchasing its own shares. The company intends to increase the total volume of repurchased shares by 50%, to $450 million.

Alena Miklashevskaya

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