What Zuckerberg must do to right the Facebook ship

Investors are starting to panic. CEO Mark Zuckerberg needs to calm the masses while building revenue-generating products.

 

Zuckerberg's first three months as a public company CEO have been rocky.

CNET - All is not well at Facebook. Some have even started calling for CEO Mark Zuckerberg's head. But the panic is premature, and the social network has plenty of time and opportunity to turn things around.

Facebook's stock price has traveled south since its flashy (and disastrous) debut in May. Facebook closed at $19.44 per share on Wednesday, barely half of its $38 IPO price.

Why is Facebook's share price dropping like a boulder off a cliff? M&A specialist Marty Wolf provides an excellent explanation, but I'll summarize the key points:

• Facebook's price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) for the last 12 months was 72.4, which puts it way above the P/E ratios of Google (20.0), Apple (15.7) and Yahoo (17.0). This would be fine if Facebook's revenue growth were accelerating, but it isn't.
• Facebook currently makes approximately $5.12 per user on an annualized basis (calculated from its most recent quarterly figure of $1.28 per user). It would need to boost that more than sixfold, to just over $33 per user, with its current userbase (about 900 million users) to justify a $38 share price.

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The Top 10 Web IPOs of all time (pre-Facebook, that is)

CNET - It wasn't long ago that the investment community was unsure if there would ever be a resurgence in IPOs. Just a few years ago, companies that, back in the late 1990s, would have jumped at going public, were balking at the idea, deciding instead to focus their efforts on growing and eventually being bought out. It was believed by some that another great Web IPO might not come along for many years.

But now, Facebook is set to change that. And by doing so, it will surpass some of the most prominent companies to ever bring services to the online world.

In the following slides, we're going to take a look at the largest Web IPOs in history, courtesy of a list compiled by Renaissance Capital, an investment-research firm that specializes in IPOs.

As one might expect, some of the latest big IPOs are included in the list, including those from Google and Zynga, but other, prominent companies you might expect to see won't be there. Renaissance's list is arranged by the biggest deal size in history, giving some additional sway to more recent IPOs that garnered huge cash in their opening.

So, without further adieu, flip your way through the slides to find out which Web companies posted the largest IPOs in history.       

Watch the Slideshow!