By Lara Holmes

Almost no one doubts that the entry into the stock market in 2012 of Facebook which is one of the financial events of 2012.

The company set up in a room of students reaches the summit of world technology.

This is also one of the largest entries into the stock market of all time, placed in sixth place in the U.S., behind names like Visa and General Motors, and the fifteenth in the world, according to Renaissance Capital research society specializing in stock market entries.

Nick Einhorn, an analyst at Renaissance Capital, expects a record repository in the first quarter to start trading between the second and fourth quarters.

The analyst expects that to assess the value of California's society will be difficult, as it was for several companies in the Internet economy that entered the market in 2011: the professional social network LinkedIn was undervalued by banks, as the site for discounts Groupon and Zynga games, which fell below the asking price as it had been artificially inflated.

The company Facebook currently valued would be about 10,000 million dollars, around the level of the fast food giant McDonalds, and far beyond industrial settings such as Boeing or Alcoa, but still far from Apple (376,000 million) or Google (209,000 million).

The relationship between turnover and capitalization would be extremely high, since Facebook's annual revenues are estimated at around 5,000 million compared to $36,000 million of Google or the 108,000 million of Apple.

Zuckerberg no longer hides they are preparing to go into the stock market, a state hardly avoidable given the fragmentation of capital that occurred as employees and investors sold their shares in the secondary market.

For Bernoff, the entry will not be so much in the stock exchange to raise funds because two weeks ago the website Gawker estimated at 3,500 billion the liquidity of Facebook on September 30, but to enhance the respectability of the group, and compare it to others larger in the sector.