Facebook looks to raise up to $13.6 bln in IPO

Social networking site Facebook set a price range late Thursday of $28 to $35 per share for its initial public offering, upping the maximum size of its offering to $13.6 billion from a prior $5 billion estimate.

The eight-year-old social networking site, started at Harvard by Mark Zuckerberg, indicated an initial public offering price range that yielded a market valuation of $77 billion to $96 billion.

If an over-allotment option is triggered, the company could sweep up a maximum of $13.6 billion, according to a prospectus.

Investors are expected to buy heavily into the year's most talked-about IPO, though some have voiced concerns about the social network's longer-term growth.

Last week, Facebook reported its first quarter-to-quarter revenue slide in at least two years, a sign that the social network's growth may be cooling just as it prepares to go public. Its stock should begin trading within a week on the Nasdaq.

Facebook's capital-raising target outstrips other Internet IPOs that came before. Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) raised just short of $2 billion in 2004. In 2011, Groupon (NASDAQ:GRPN) tapped investors for $700 million and Zynga (NASDAQ:ZNGA) raked in $1 billion.

At the maximum end of the range, Facebook's value would be close to $100 billion which would rival the market value of Amazon. com (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Cisco Systems' (NASDAQ:CSCO) market values of just over $100 billion, while beating the combined value of older tech players Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HPQ) and Dell (NASDAQ:DELL).

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