Pinterest files with U.S. securities regulators for IPO

SAN FRANCISCO, March 22 (Xinhua) -- U.S. social media and image search site Pinterest Inc. Friday filed with the U.S. SECurities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for initial public offering (IPO).

San Francisco-based Pinterest registered with the SEC and released its IPO prospectus, which showed strong user growth worldwide and millions of U.S. dollars in profit in the fourth quarter of 2018.

According to its Friday filing with the SEC, Pinterest generated a profit of 47 million dollars on revenue of 273 million dollars in the fourth quarter of last year, while it generated a revenue of 756 million dollars for the year ending on Dec. 31, 2018.

Pinterest said key investors like Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase Co., and Allen Co. will serve as lead joint book-running managers for the offering.

The image collection and storage company said it has more than 250 million monthly active users, of whom two thirds are female.

Pinterest allows its users to sign into its service by using their Facebook and Google credentials to share daily activities, such as cooking dinner, deciding what to wear, remodeling a house or training for a marathon.

Despite Pinterest's commitment to continued growth, it also mentioned potential risks for investors as it acknowledged its dependence on internet search-engines to direct traffic and refer new users to its service.

Internet traffic from Google or Facebook, which boasts more than 2.3 billion monthly active users globally, remains significant to Pinterest's revenue and financial results.

Any changes in policy or algorithms by Google, Facebook or other internet companies can drastically impact Pinterest's own business.

"If Facebook or Google discontinue single sign-on or experience an outage, then we may lose and be unable to recover users previously using this function, and our user growth or engagement could decline," Pinterest said in its filing with the SEC.

"Any of these events could harm our business, revenue and financial results," it added.

Pinterest was established in 2010 as a social media company that offers an online venue for personal photos, ideas, oddities, places to visit, recipes and other items.