Facebook flies to Dubai for cash

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 3 Nov 2008 at 10:33

Facebook is reportedly looking to Dubai for further investment as the company struggles to weather the gloomy economy.

The company's chief financial officer, Gideon Yu, has flown to Dubai to search for a foreign cash injection according to TechCrunch, which claims the company is losing money despite robust revenue figures.

The site is certainly seeing healthy traffic, with over 160 million unique page views and more than 60 billion hits per month. For a website funded partially by advertising revenue, these are promising figures, although TechCrunch suggests that it costs around $200 million "just to keep the lights on".

Despite rumours, the company denies that it's in any financial trouble. "Facebook is well positioned, both financially and within the market, and any thoughtful attempt to model our business should reflect that," says a statement released to VentureBeat.

Facebook has raised capital in the past by selling shares, including a 1.6% stake to Microsoft. The company paid $240 million for the tiny sliver of the social networking site, giving a total valuation of some $5 billion.

However, court documents later emerged that showed Facebook believed its true value to be a slightly more modest $3.75 billion.