Investments place value of Facebook at $50 billion

NEW YORK – An injection of cash that values Facebook at $50 billion will help it delay going public for at least another year, giving the company breathing room to focus on long-term ambition rather than short-term profit.

The infusion — $500 million from elite investment house Goldman Sachs and a Russian investor, according to a report by The New York Times — represents the most emphatic endorsement yet of Facebook’s potential to make money in online social networking.

It places the company at twice the value of Internet giant Yahoo and about equal to what well-established names such as Boeing and Kraft Foods are worth on the open market.

More important, it buys time for Facebook to keep its books private and not have to cater to the demands of the market. And it gives 26-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg room to grow into his role as the public face of a multinational company.

Zuckerberg is widely believed to be more comfortable operating behind the scenes, thinking about technology and business, than engaging in public discourse, says Standard & Poor’s equity analyst Scott Kessler, who follows large Internet companies.

“There is still some question whether he has the persona to be a public CEO and, if he doesn’t, would he be willing to cede control to someone who does,” says Mark Heeson, president of the National Venture Capital Association, a trade group that represents firms that invest in startups. “That is probably an issue that Facebook’s board has been discussing for some time.”

As it nears the seventh anniversary of its founding in a Harvard dorm room, Facebook is already slightly more mature than Google was when it went public, in 2004. At the time, investors placed Google’s value at about $24 billion.

By the time Google turned 7, in September 2005, its market value had ballooned to about $90 billion, and the company wound up with $6 billion in revenue that year.

Google, like Facebook, wanted to stay private as long as possible to avoid public scrutiny of its finances, investor complaints about its strategy and potential management distractions.

The $50 billion is more than twice as much as the market’s valuation of Yahoo. It’s also worth more than eBay, but still less than Amazon.com — not to mention Google, which now stands at nearly $200 billion.

Facebook has grown quickly as a business, even as it seeks to retain a startup culture, valuing innovation, hiring the smartest engineers from its neighbors and gobbling up small tech companies.