Facebook's IPO was influenced by struggle to switch from desktop to mobile!

Facebook held its initial public offering (IPO) on Friday, May 18, 2012.The IPO was the biggest in technology and one of the biggest in Internet history, with a peak market capitalization of over $104 billion but it seems like Facebook almost cancelled its $16 billion (£12.3 billion) initial public offering within that year because its internal revenue projections were so bad, according to court testimony in a class-action lawsuit.

In April 2012, Mark Zuckerberg had texted Priscilla Chan (his wife): "Everything here is going really badly. Our revenue projection has gone down so much we now think we might go public at less than $50bn if things continue."

During that time, Facebook was having struggle to make the switch from desktop to mobile. The company went public in May that year after he called a really quick meeting with top executives in the company in a hotel room in New York.

Right after they agreed on their decision, Mark then sent another text to Chan: "IPO is on." She replied, "Yay."

According to the Financial Times report, main investors, including the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System, are claiming that Facebook and its underwriters misled investors by failing to disclose that users' switch to mobile was affecting Facebook's revenue. The investors said the risk had been described as only theoretical.

But Facebook's legal representative, Andrew Clubok, said it wasn't possible for the company to have quantified that risk and that Facebook's revenue had begun to rebound by the time of the float.The representative said"We remain confident that our disclosures were complete, accurate, and complied with applicable law."

While Facebook was originally slow to transition to mobile, it quickly developed gradually into a mobile-first company. By 2013, half its revenue was coming from mobile advertising. It now accounts for 85%of the company's ad revenue.