Twitter makes fantastic public debut, shares surge 73%

Twitter today made a scintillating debut on the New York Stock Exchange with its scrip climbing around 73 percent over the issue price at USD 45.1 apiece, valuing the microblogging site at nearly USD 25 billion.

Twitter, whose public debut is the most highly anticipated IPO since Facebook's USD 16 billion offering in May 2012, began trading under the ticker 'TWTR'.

Ahead of its debut at the New York Stock Exchange today, microblogging site Twitter priced its initial public offering at USD 26 dollar a share, meaning it would raise USD 1.8 billion in the 70-million share offering, before expenses.

Goldman Sachs & Co, Morgan Stanley, J P Morgan, BofA Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank Securities are acting as book-runners for the offering.

The microblogging site priced its IPO above the range of 23-25 a share that it had set earlier in the week. Investors are expected to watch Twitter's public debut with both caution and interest after the problem-riddled IPO of Facebook took away some shine from the social networking site's public debut on Nasdaq last year.

Shares of Facebook today were last trading at USD 48.6, down 1.1 percent  on the Nasdaq. Twitter, which lets people post news and comments in 140-character messages called tweets, is yet to make a profit after seven years in existence.

Twitter's loss widened to USD 64.6 million in the September quarter from USD 21.6 million a year earlier. Its revenue has gone up to USD 534.5 million for the year ended September 30.

It had 231.7 million monthly users in the quarter ending in September, up 39 percent  from a year earlier. Yesterday, Barclays Capital said Twitter had hired it to be its "designated market maker," a critical role when a stock starts trading. A DMM is an experienced trader who supervises the trading of a company's stock on the NYSE.