[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]
According to Kara Swisher, Mark Zuckerberg told a group of Facebook employees yesterday that the company is on track to take in between $300-350 million revenue this year, up handily from an estimated $150 million in 2007. While that’s impressive growth, with a price-to-sales ratio of 100x (and 50x forward price-to-sales) it makes the company’s $15 billion valuation look fairly ridiculous in comparison to fast-growing, publicly traded Internet companies. Here are a few examples:
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]
Additionally, when you consider that Microsoft has just bid only 3x as much (around $45 billion) to acquire Yahoo, a company with nearly $7 billion in annual revenue, the Facebook valuation looks even more frothy.
That said, Microsoft’s investment of $240 million is barely a blip on the company’s balance sheet, so even if Facebook never grows into its valuation, it isn’t a huge loss for the software giant. The deal was mainly about locking up their advertising relationship with Facebook.