The largest social network in Russia, VKontakte, initially positioned itself as a community uniting students and university graduates. Over the years, the project has developed into a modern, fast and powerful tool for online communication. Every day, the social network is visited by more than 30 million people who have the opportunity to communicate, exchange photos and videos with their friends. One of the stages of the project's development should be entering the stock market.
Entry into the securities market for the social network VKontakte was supposed to begin with the initial public offering of the company's shares on the stock exchange. This process, also referred to as IPO (Initial Public Offering), is used by growing joint stock companies in order to attract investment and increase assets. However, in the last days of May 2012, it became clear that the planned entry of the VKontakte social network to the exchange would be postponed indefinitely. This was announced in his blog by the project manager Pavel Durov.
The social network VKontakte announced its plans to enter the stock exchange back in 2011. According to Bloomberg, the project management already in the summer of 2011 was negotiating with investment banks, planning an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. The preliminary dates for the IPO were also determined - the beginning of 2012.
Observers associate the decision to postpone the timeline for entering the securities market with the unsuccessful participation in the IPO of another large social network - Facebook. FB entered the American stock exchange Nasdaq in May 2012 and was marked by a scandal. The "Vesti. RU" agency quotes Pavel Durov as saying that the IPO of the world's largest social network Facebook shaken investors' faith in social networks, making investments in them risky.
On the first day of Facebook's listing on the Nasdaq exchange, they traded at the upper level of the price range, but after a few days, the value of the securities fell even below the IPO price, which led not only to a reduction in the fortune of FB founder Mark Zuckerberg, but also to significant financial losses. shareholders.
Pavel Durov, who owns 12% of the shares of VKontakte, at the end of May 2012 got the opportunity to vote with the securities of another shareholder of the social network - Mail.ru Group, which owned almost 40% of the shares. Thus, now the head of VKontakte has almost complete control over the company. Analysts are in no hurry to make predictions about the timing of the postponement of the IPO of the social network. Most likely, much will depend on the dynamics of the Facebook stock price, which will have to restore its market reputation.
