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Our Products: Empower more than 3 billion people around the world to share ideas, offer support and make a difference.
$3 billion+ raisedBy our community to support the causes they care about
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100 billion+ messages shared every dayHelp people stay close even when they are far apart
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180 million+ businessesUse our apps to connect with customers and grow
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1 billion+ stories shared every dayHelp people express themselves and connect
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Our Mission: Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.
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Our Culture: At Facebook, we are constantly iterating, solving problems and working together to connect people all over the world. That’s why it’s important that our workforce reflects the diversity of the people we serve. Hiring people with different backgrounds and points of view helps us make better decisions, build better products and create better experiences for everyone.
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Our Principles: Our principles are what we stand for. They are beliefs we hold deeply and make tradeoffs to pursue.
Give People a Voice People deserve to be heard and to have a voice — even when that means defending the right of people we disagree with.
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Build Connection and Community Our services help people connect, and when they’re at their best, they bring people closer together.
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Serve Everyone We work to make technology accessible to everyone, and our business model is ads so our services can be free.
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Keep People Safe and Protect Privacy We have a responsibility to promote the best of what people can do together by keeping people safe and preventing harm.
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Promote Economic Opportunity Our tools level the playing field so businesses grow, create jobs and strengthen the economy.
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FACEBOOK, INC
Facebook, Inc. is an American technology conglomerate based in Menlo Park, California. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, along with his fellow roommates and students at Harvard College, who were Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, originally as TheFacebook.com—today's Facebook, a popular global social networking service. Facebook is one of the world's most valuable companies. It is considered one of the Big Five companies in the U.S. information technology industry, along with Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. Facebook offers other products and services beyond its social networking platform, including Facebook Messenger, Facebook Watch, and Facebook Portal. It also has acquired Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Giphy and Mapillary, and has a 9.9% stake in Jio Platforms. |
History
Facebook filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on February 1, 2012. The preliminary prospectus stated that the company was seeking to raise $5 billion. The document announced that the company had 845 million active monthly users and its website featured 2.7 billion daily likes and comments. After the IPO, Zuckerberg would retain a 22% ownership share in Facebook and would own 57% of the voting shares. Underwriters valued the shares at $38 each, pricing the company at $104 billion, the largest valuation to date for a newly public company. On May 16, one day before the IPO, Facebook announced that it would sell 25% more shares than originally planned due to high demand. The IPO raised $16 billion, making it the third largest in U.S. history (just ahead of AT&T Wireless and behind only General Motors and Visa). The stock price left the company with a higher market capitalization than all but a few U.S. corporations – surpassing heavyweights such as Amazon, McDonald's, Disney, and Kraft Foods – and made Zuckerberg's stock worth $19 billion. The New York Times stated that the offering overcame questions about Facebook's difficulties in attracting advertisers to transform the company into a "must-own stock". Jimmy Lee of JPMorgan Chase described it as "the next great blue-chip". Writers at TechCrunch, on the other hand, expressed skepticism, stating, "That's a big multiple to live up to, and Facebook will likely need to add bold new revenue streams to justify the mammoth valuation". Trading in the stock, which began on May 18, was delayed that day due to technical problems with the NASDAQ exchange. The stock struggled to stay above the IPO price for most of the day, forcing underwriters to buy back shares to support the price. At closing bell, shares were valued at $38.23, only $0.23 above the IPO price and down $3.82 from the opening bell value. The opening was widely described by the financial press as a disappointment. The stock nonetheless set a new record for trading volume of an IPO. On May 25, 2012, the stock ended its first full week of trading at $31.91, a 16.5% decline. On May 22, 2012, regulators from Wall Street's Financial Industry Regulatory Authority announced that they had begun to investigate whether banks underwriting Facebook had improperly shared information only with select clients, rather than the general public. Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin subpoenaed Morgan Stanley over the same issue. The allegations sparked "fury" among some investors and led to the immediate filing of several lawsuits, one of them a class action suit claiming more than $2.5 billion in losses due to the IPO. Bloomberg estimated that retail investors may have lost approximately $630 million on Facebook stock since its debut. Standard & Poor's added Facebook, Inc. to its S&P 500 index on December 21, 2013. On May 2, 2014, Zuckerberg announced that the company would be changing its internal motto from "Move fast and break things" to "Move fast with stable infrastructure". The earlier motto had been described as Zuckerberg's "prime directive to his developers and team" in a 2009 interview in Business Insider, in which he also said "Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough." In May 2019, Facebook founded Libra Networks, reportedly in order to develop their own stablecoin cryptocurrency. In recent developments it has been reported that Libra is being supported by financial companies like Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Uber. The consortium of companies is expected to pool in $10 million each to fund the launch of the cryptocurrency coin named Libra. Depending on when it receives approval from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory authority to operate as a payments service, the Libra Association plans to launch a limited format cryptocurrency in 2021. After the attack of January 6, 2021 against the US Capitol, Facebook announced that it will ban the advertisements of weapon accessories and the products that can are can be used for any armed combat. This ban will last at least 2 days after the inauguration of U.S. President Joe Biden on Jan. 20.
Facilities
Offices Users outside of the US and Canada contract with Facebook's Irish subsidiary "Facebook Ireland Limited". In return, This allows Facebook to avoid US taxes for all users in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and South America. Facebook is making use of the Double Irish arrangement which allows it to pay just about 2–3% corporation tax on all international revenue. In 2010, Facebook opened its fourth office, in Hyderabad India. Facebook's Hyderabad centre houses online advertising and developer support teams and provide support to users and advertisers. In India Facebook is registered as 'Facebook India Online Services Pvt Ltd'. It also has support centers in Dublin,[clarification needed] California, Ireland and Austin, Texas. Facebook opened its London headquarters in 2017 in Fitzrovia in central London. Facebook opened an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2018. The offices were initially home to Facebook's "Connectivity Lab", a group focused on bringing Internet access to those who do not have access to the Internet. Entrance to Facebook's previous headquarters in the Stanford Research Park, Palo Alto, California
Entrance to Facebook headquarters complex in Menlo Park, California
Inside the Facebook headquarters in 2014
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Mergers and acquisitions
Throughout its existence, Facebook has acquired multiple companies (often identified as talent acquisitions). One of its first major acquisitions was in April 2012, when Facebook acquired Instagram for approximately US$1 billion in cash and stock. In October 2013, Facebook acquired Onavo, an Israeli mobile web analytics company. In February 2014, Facebook announced that it would be buying mobile messaging company WhatsApp for US$19 billion in cash and stock. Later that year, Facebook bought Oculus VR for $2.3 billion in stock and cash, which released its first consumer virtual reality headset in 2016. In late July 2019, the company announced it was under antitrust investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. In late November 2019, Facebook announced the acquisition of game developer Beat Games, responsible for developing one of the year's most popular VR titles, Beat Saber. In April 2020, Facebook announced a $5.7 billion deal with the Indian multinational conglomerate Reliance Industries to purchase approximately 10 percent of Jio Platforms, Reliance's digital media and services entity. In May 2020, Facebook announced that they had acquired Giphy for a reported cash price of $400 million. The product will be integrated with the Instagram team. Facebook announced in November 2020 that they plan to purchase the customer-service platform and chatbot specialist startup Kustomer in attempt to promote companies to use their platform for business. It has been reported that Kustomer is being valued at a little over $1 billion. Lobbying In 2019 Facebook spent $16.7m on lobbying and had a team of 71 lobbyists, up from $12.6m and 51 lobbyists in 2018.[46] Lawsuits Facebook has been involved in multiple lawsuits since its founding. In March 2020, The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) has sued Facebook Inc., for significant and persistent infringements of the rule on privacy involving the Cambridge Analytica fiasco. Every violation of the Privacy Act is subject to a theoretical cumulative liability of $1.7 million. The OAIC estimated that a total of 311,127 Australians had been exposed. On December 8, 2020, the Federal Trade Commission, along with 46 US states (excluding Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and South Dakota), the District of Columbia and the territory of Guam, launched Federal Trade Commission v. Facebook as an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. The lawsuit concerns Facebook’s acquisition of two competitors – Instagram and WhatsApp – and the ensuing monopolistic situation. FTC alleges that Facebook holds monopolistic power in the US social networking market and seeks to force the company to divest from Instagram and WhatsApp to break up the conglomerate. William Kovacic, a former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, argued the case will be difficult to win as it would require the government to create a counterfactual argument of an internet where the Facebook-WhatsApp-Instagram entity did not exist, and prove that harmed competition or consumers.
Revenue
Facebook ranked No. 76 in the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by revenue. Most comes from advertising. One analysis of 2017 data determined that the company earned US$20.21 per user from advertising. Tax affairs The US IRS challenged the valuation Facebook used when it transferred IP from the US to Facebook Ireland in 2010 (which Facebook Ireland then revalued higher before charging out), as it was building its double Irish tax structure. The case is ongoing and Facebook faces a potential fine of $3–5bn. The US Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 changed Facebook's global tax calculations. Facebook Ireland is subject to the US GILTI tax of 10.5% on global intangible profits (i.e. Irish profits). On the basis that Facebook Ireland is paying some tax, the effective minimum US tax for Facebook Ireland will be circa 11%. In contrast, Facebook Inc. would incur a special IP tax rate of 13.125% (the FDII rate) if its Irish business relocated to the US. Tax relief in the US (21% vs. Irish at the GILTI rate) and accelerated capital expensing, would make this effective US rate around 12%. The insignificance of the US/Irish tax difference was demonstrated when Facebook moved 1.5bn non-EU accounts to the US to limit exposure to GDPR.
Data centres
As of 2019 the company operated 16 data centre locations. Facebook committed to purchase 100 percent renewable energy and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 75 percent by 2020. Data center technologies include Fabric Aggregator, a distributed network system that accommodates larger regions and varied traffic patterns.
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