Facebook’s finance chief, Gideon Yu, will leave the company soon. The fast-growing social-networking site wants someone with “public company experience.”

Yu, 37, has been with Facebook for sometime now and has an important role in structuring the core financial operations of Facebook. He was appointed as the CFO in July 2007 after his experience in Yahoo Inc., Google Inc.’s YouTube and a venture-capital firm. While in YouTube, Yu helped in the negotiations of its sale to Google in a deal of $1.76 billion in 2006.

This change may be a sign that the company is planning to go public soon. However Facebook has declared that it has no intention of going public soon.

Facebook has about 200 million users worldwide. The company is said to do well despite the recession and ready for its next stage of growth. According to various reports in the media Facebook may be able to grow its revenue by 70 percent this year. It hopes to generate positive cash flow by 2010.

However, there is confusion regarding the value of Facebook if it were to go public. According to an investment by Microsoft Corp. in 2007, it has a market value of $15 billion. However the investment was in preferred stock and cannot imply the price for common stocks on the open market. According to own appraisal by Facebook during a recent court hearing, it’s privately held shares have a value of $8.88 each, which means the company has a market value of $3.7 billion. But seeing the present status of the IPO market, Facebook may not go public soon, as companies with cash reserves are more likely to hold off going public until the market improves.