NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Social media network Twitter is leaning toward picking the New York Stock Exchange over Nasdaq for its highly-anticipated initial public offering, a person familiar with the matter said.
A report earlier on Tuesday by The Street said Twitter had already chosen the NYSE, but sources close to the exchanges told Reuters that Twitter has not made its decision yet.
Big Board parent NYSE Euronext, Nasdaq OMX Group and Twitter had no comment.
The competition for what is the most coveted technology listing since Facebook Inc, which chose Nasdaq for its market debut in May last year, is fierce, one of the sources said.
Technical glitches and questionable decisions at Nasdaq during the Facebook market debut led to losses by market makers and Nasdaq paid $ 10 million to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to settle charges related to the errors. It also voluntarily set up a $ 62 million fund to compensate firms harmed by the problems. The issues during the Facebook IPO have played into Twitter’s thinking, according to The Street.
Twitter, which is expected to be valued at up to $ 15 billion, filed with regulators on September 12 to go public, but did so confidentially under a process available to emerging growth companies and did not give a timeline.
Traditionally, Nasdaq had a lock on technology company listings, and NYSE on blue-chip stocks, but both have made inroads into each others’ respective territories in recent years.
During the lead-up to Facebook’s IPO, the chief executives from both Nasdaq and NYSE were reported to have flown to California to woo the management of the social network.
NYSE CEO Duncan Niederauer is currently in San Diego for a summit being held by Oracle Corp, which moved its listing to NYSE from Nasdaq in July in the largest ever U.S. market transfer. Last year, Kraft Foods moved to Nasdaq from the NYSE in what was, until Oracle’s announcement, the biggest company to ever switch exchanges.
(Reporting by John McCrank and Olivia Oran in New York, and Gerry Shih in San Francisco; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
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