Twitter IPO: $1B offering on $253M of revenue and $69M loss in first half of 2013

Twitter finally released its S-1 IPO documentation this afternoon and will be seeking to raise $1 billion. The company has not yet set a price for its stock.

The company currently has 200 million active users, the S-1 says, and 500 million tweets a day, but with only 100 million daily active users, lower than some have estimated. In addition, tweets have appeared on over one million other websites as embedded tweets, and there were 30 billion online impressions of tweets in 2013’s first quarter alone.

“Since the first tweet, our users have created over 300 billion tweets,” Twitter says.

See also: Twitter’s global challenge: 77% of its users bring in only 25% of revenue

And: Twitter: The IPO in pictures

However, even though the company has grown top-line revenue significantly over the last years, from $28 million in 2010 to $253 million in the first half of 2013, Twitter is still not making money. For 2012, the company lost $79 million, and for the first six months of 2013, the company lost $69 million.

The shares that Twitter is offering exclude 44 million options with an exercise price of just $1.82, almost 60 million restricted unit shares still outstanding, plus almost 15 million shares dedicated to the complete of its recent MoPub acquisition, and 8 million shares reserved for future equity-incentive uses. The company’s total outstanding shares total 472,613,753.

Twitter says that 75 percent of its monthly active users come from mobile devices, and 65 percent of its revenue is on mobile, echoing recent reports from Facebook that mobile monetization is growing extremely quickly.

Twitter may be losing money, but it clearly has cash on hand, and cash to expand. The company has $164 million in cash and equivalents, plus another $210 million in short-term investments, and yet another $382 million in working capital, for total assets — with property and equipment — of just under a billion dollars: $964 million.

In its filing, Twitter is telling the world that it can be the “content creation, distribution, and discovery platform for the Internet and evolving mobile ecosystem,” combining the elements of public data, real-time information, conversation tone, and massive distribution. The resulting value proposition for advertisers, the company says, is: unique ad formats (its suite of promoted tweets, accounts, etc.), interest targeting, viral global reach, real-time advertising, pay-for-performance, and the extension of offline advertising, as on TV.

In the future, Twitter will be adding geographical expansion, more mobile apps, and more platform partners to drive the growth of the ecosystem. In addition, the company will be improving its targeting and ad platform capabilities, and adding new advertising formats.