LOS AN­GE­LES - Face­book could file reg­u­la­to­ry pa­pers as ear­ly as yes­ter­day for its high­ly an­tic­i­pat­ed ini­tial pub­lic of­fer­ing of stock, ac­cord­ing to a news­pa­per re­port. Face­book's ex­pect­ed launch as a pub­licly trad­ed com­pa­ny is the most hot­ly an­tic­i­pat­ed tech IPO in more than a decade. It would vault it in­to the top ranks of the largest pub­lic com­pa­nies in the world, on par with the likes of Mc­Don­ald's Corp, Ama­zon.com Inc, Visa Inc and Bank of Amer­i­ca Corp. The Wall Street Jour­nal, cit­ing un­named peo­ple fa­mil­iar with the mat­ter, said Fri­day that the so­cial-net­work­ing com­pa­ny could raise as much as US$10 bil­lion in an of­fer­ing that would val­ue the com­pa­ny at US$75 bil­lion to US$100 bil­lion.

Ei­ther mea­sure would dwarf the US$1.67 bil­lion raised in Google's 2004 IPO. That of­fer­ing gave Google a mar­ket val­ue of US$23 bil­lion. Google is now worth US$184 bil­lion. CEO and founder Mark Zucker­berg, 27, is al­ready con­sid­ered a bil­lion­aire be­cause of shares trad­ed on a closed mar­ket.

AP