NEW YORK: Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg rang the opening bell of the Nasdaq stock market from his California office on Friday, to announce the listing of his company.

Amid a crowd at the social network’s headquarters, Zuckerberg and hundreds of Facebook employees cheered the market open. Facebook shares were to start trading later in the day in the largest offering for a technology firm.

The company’s stock, priced at $38 per share, will begin trading under the symbol “FB” on the Nasdaq, giving the leading website a dizzying value of $104 billion at its initial public offering (IPO).

Facebook is raising $16 billion from the share offering, making it the richest IPO after financial giant Visa in 2008, according to Renaissance Capital. The addition of a possible stock “over-allotment” could boost the total to $18.4 billion.

Facebook itself is selling 180 million shares and early investors in the company, which has grown from its humble Harvard origins into an online community of more than 900 million users, are selling 241 million.

With a market value of $104 billion, Facebook would be among the most valuable US companies, ahead of sector giants Amazon ($98 billion) and Cisco ($89 billion), and more than twice the value of Ford Motor Co. ($38 billion).

But it remains behind Google ($203 billion) and Apple ($495 billion).

Under the share plan, Zuckerberg will hold 55.8 per cent of the voting power of Facebook shares, and over 18 per cent of the value of the company, which he controls through a dual-class stock structure.

The IPO’s net proceeds to Facebook are estimated at $6.4 billion. The rest of the cash goes to Facebook insiders and others who made early investments in the social network, and to cover the IPO costs.

The Wall Street Journal said 57 per cent of shares will be from insiders, which is an unusually high percentage. Under Wall Street rules, investors have to wait six months to sell any shares not offered at the IPO.

Some analysts predicted Facebook’s stock price would jump quickly to $44 a share but the long-term outlook is less clear.

At the heart of the debate about the wisdom of owning a piece of Facebook is how much revenue it takes in.

Revenue vaulted to $1.06 billion in the quarter which ended March 31 – an improvement year-over-year but down about six per cent from the previous quarter.

According to Experian Hitwise, Facebook.com received nine per cent of all US Internet visits in April 2012. It had 1.6 billion visits a week and averaged more than 229 million US visits a day for the year-to-date.