Facebook S-1 Confirms IPO Share Price Of $28-$35, Raising $5B To $6.3B, Hardware Patent Lawsuit Threats

Facebook just posted a fith amendment to its IPO filing, confirming the price range for its stock at IPO, how much it will raise, and noting the future threat of patent lawsuits from Yahoo over hardware in Facebook’s Open Compute Project. The company is selling 180,000,000 shares of Class A common stock and is pricing them at $28-$35. That means they’re raising between $5 and $6.3 billion. On top of that, existing shareholders are selling 157,415,352 shares.

Here’s the excerpt:

Facebook, Inc. is offering 180,000,000 shares of its Class A common stock and the selling stockholders are offering 157,415,352 shares of Class A common stock. We will not receive any proceeds from the sale of shares by the selling stockholders. This is our initial public offering and no public market currently exists for our shares of Class A common stock. We anticipate that the initial public offering price will be between $28.00 and $35.00 per share.

This confirms the earlier pricing that we posted about today. We had a more specific range than The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, saying the price was at $27-$35. We were off by a dollar, but they said ‘high 20s to mid 30s’ in their original stories.

Facebook has already been fighting Yahoo over patents, and had to spend more than a half-billion dollars to pick up patents from Microsoft in defense. Facebook notes that it received a letter from Yahoo warning that technology used in Facebook’s Open Compute Project hardware may violate 16 Yahoo patents.

Here’s what Facebook said in the S-1:

“Yahoo could in the future assert additional patent or other claims against us in this or in other proceedings. For example, we received a letter dated April 23, 2012 from Yahoo indicating that they believe 16 patents they claim to hold “may be relevant” to open source technology they allege is being used in our data centers and servers. Yahoo has not threatened or initiated litigation with respect to matters described in this letter but it may do so in the future.”

That letter is embedded below. Facebook’s response to the letter from Yahoo is:

“Yahoo’s letter takes aim not just at Facebook but at open source and energy-efficient green technologies developed and employed by countless innovative, forward-thinking companies and engineers. We’re defending vigorously against Yahoo’s current lawsuit, and would likewise do so against any new assertions.”

This all means that even if Facebook’s escapes the current 12-patent infringement lawsuit from Yahoo, it won’t be in the clear. Yahoo won’t either, though. This letter stating Yahoo’s possessions of proprietary server patents related to technology in Facebook’s eco-friendly open source initiative could further tarnish its name and lead more to call it a patent troll and enemy of innovation.

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