Summary
8 November 2013
Shares in the microblogging site, Twitter, have nearly doubled in value in the first few hours of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The share price rose above $45, valuing the company at more than $25bn.
Reporter:
Mark Gregory
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Report
It will go down as one of the most spectacular debuts in the history of financial markets.
Twitter has only been around seven years, has never made a profit and has modest sources of income - yet its shares rose 80% in value the moment it joined the stock market, and then briefly soared even higher than that.
Measured by the stock price in relation to revenues, Twitter's shares are now rated as among the most expensive of any new share issue ever.
It's a big bet that popularity - Twitter already has 230 million users - will eventually lead to massive profits.
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Grammar
- go down
become known
- debuts
first appearances; (here) launches
- profit
money earned after costs are paid
- modest
few and small
- sources of income
people or organisations which it gets money from
- soared
rose very quickly and very highly
- revenue
money which is received regularly
