Twitter Now Valued at $11 Billion, Analyst Says

Fueling more speculation about a possible IPO next year, an analyst looking at trading in secondary markets says Twitter's value is now north of $11 billion.

Max Wolff, an analyst with Greencrest, told Forbes that Twitter's value is up since Facebook's IPO last year. "Using the secondary market for shares to mark enterprise value is a very difficult and opaque process. It is a rumor rich and special share class soup," he told the publication.

The $11 billion figure reflects the growth in users and "new monetization efforts are both yielding fruit and pointing toward a good 2013 for Twitter," Wolff added. Rumors of a purchase by Apple are also boosting the numbers. The secondary market refers to the buying and selling of pre-existing investments in the company. The SEC caps the number of investors at 499. Beyond that, a company is required to go public.
Though Twitter's valuation is far less than the $100 billion figure floated for the pre-IPO Facebook, Wolff concluded that Twitter 's valuation looks better than Facebook's did when it went public.

The last figure circulated for Twitter's valuation was $8 billion in July 2011. That amount was extrapolated by an $800 million round of funding that Twitter secured at the time. In December 2010, Twitter's valuation was estimated at $3.7 billion.

Despite the growth of Twitter's business -- eMarketer estimates revenues for the company will hit $1 billion in 2014 -- CEO Dick Costolo said as recently as September that the company has no plans to go public.
Twitter reps could not be reached for comment on the report.

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