Wall Street’s all a-Twitter.
Bankers are fighting over Twitter’s financial crumbs after Goldman Sachs nabbed the plum assignment as lead underwriter for the company’s initial public offering.
Sources said several banks, including Goldman, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America, are jockeying to provide a credit line to the micro-blogging service ahead of the IPO.
Some of those banks looking to extend the loan are also hoping to secure at least a secondary underwriting role on the share offering.
The period leading up to the share sale is often the best time to raise fresh cash at the most attractive terms, providing a financial cushion for the company, according to sources.
Bankers sometimes advise companies to secure as much rainy-day cash as they can ahead of a listing, in case market turbulence or other factors delay the IPO.
Twitter could seek anywhere from a $500 million to $1 billion revolving line of credit. If it follows Zynga’s lead, it would go for the upper range of $1 billion.
A Twitter spokesman did not return a call seeking comment.
Meanwhile, Twitter has told bankers working on the IPO to keep their lips sealed. The company wants to avoid a repeat of Facebook’s over-hyped market debut, which disappointed investors when the shares traded below the IPO price for nearly a year.
Twitter also may be willing to leave some money on the table in pricing its stock offering to get that first-day pop, sources said.
While it could take a more novel IPO path, such as the Dutch auction employed by Google, sources said Twitter would be likely to conduct a conventional share sale by year end or early in the first quarter.
Twitter, which elected to submit a confidential IPO filing with regulators, does not have to make its financial information public until 21 days before it intends to market the deal to prospective investors.