A day to forget for LinkedIn on Wall Street: the stock dropped almost 41% after the quarterly published yesterday after the close of trading. Even if profit and turnover exceeded analysts' forecasts, the outlook for the current year was particularly worrying to perplexed investors: LinkedIn expects a turnover of 820 million dollars for the first quarter, against 867 million consensus estimates, and earnings per share of 55 cents, less than the 74 expected by analysts.
As a result, the shares were hit today by a sell-off that burned the company's market capitalization by 10 billion dollars (currently it is around 15,2 billion dollars). Today's sharp drop is also a blow to co-founder Reid Hoffman, current president of the company: he controls about 11% of the company, mostly Class B shares which guarantee ten times more voting rights than Class A, and the value of its share is down about $1,2 billion. When the Wall Street session began about two hours ago, LinkedIn lost 40,80% to 113,84 dollars per share, after having touched a low of 110,01 dollars.
