Topic: IPOs
Rovio’s IPO Ends the Day Flat with Opening Price (Sep 29, 2017)
Rovio, the Finnish company behind the Angry Birds franchise, held its IPO today, just a day after TV box and platform maker Roku, but saw very different results. Whereas Roku saw a massive jump in its stock price in its first day of trading, Rovio’s stock ended the day back where it started, having traded in a pretty narrow range all day. In the context of Roku’s IPO and expectations for Spotify’s, I’ve been asked a lot recently about the prospects for tech IPOs overall, and my response is always the same: it’s not really about the “climate” for tech IPOs (though that clearly matters), but about the performance of each company in its own right. In the case of these two companies, a quick glance might make you think Rovio was actually in better shape, profitable and growing whereas Roku is unprofitable and growing. But it’s all about the trajectory and ultimate potential when it comes to valuations, and while Roku seems to be in the midst of a clear transition which should lead to profits and revenue growth, Rovio continues to be very reliant on a single franchise, Angry Birds, and though it’s expanded the nature of gameplay in games released under that banner considerably, none of its recent game launches have come close to matching the performance of the top games globally over the last couple of years. So Rovio is a mid-tier mobile game maker with some profits and growth but there’s no great success story here, nor any sign of a dramatic positive change in its fortunes. Spotify, on the other hand, is like Roku currently unprofitable, but there is at least a theory as to how it might eventually turn that around with enough growth in paid streaming, off the back of recently renegotiated record deals.
via TechCrunch
Roku IPO Sees Stock Rise Over 50% on First Day (Sep 28, 2017)
Roku went public on the NASDAQ today after filing its S-1 earlier this month with the SEC, and saw its stock pop on its first day of trading, rising from its $14 opening price to as much as $23 in the middle of the day before falling a little, settling in at around $21 at the time I’m writing, about a half hour before markets close. That’s a great start for Roku, which was far from a shoo-in as a consumer tech IPO given its big business model pivot, its losses, and the fact that it competes against three of the biggest names in consumer tech in Amazon, Apple, and Google. Other big consumer tech IPOs this year haven’t fared well, notably Snap Inc’s, but the main reasons for the poor stock performance have been grounded in poor company performance, so we’ll have to see how Roku fares in its first couple of quarterly reports, with the first one likely coming a month or so from now. To commemorate the Roku IPO, I added a Roku deck to the Jackdaw Research Quarterly Decks subscription service today, and will be recording a video voiceover for the deck shortly (a discount is available for those who buy both subscriptions, so contact me if you’d like the discount code for that).
via Variety
Angry Birds Maker Rovio Announces Plans to Go Public (Sep 5, 2017)
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★ Roku Files to Go Public, Loses Money, Sees Ads as Core of Future Business Model (Sep 1, 2017)
Roku today made public its S-1 filing with the SEC as the first step towards a long-awaited IPO. I’ve been tweeting charts and nuggets from the filing for the last couple of hours in this thread, but I’ll provide a brief summary here. The long and the short of it is that Roku is growing at a decent clip, is currently unprofitable with little sign of that changing, and is in the midst of a big shift in its business model. Whereas for most of its history selling its streaming boxes has been its core revenue stream, it’s recently added a platform licensing business, but that’s not actually where its new revenue streams are coming from. Rather, it licenses its platform very cheaply and monetizes usage by taking a cut of certain subscriptions sold through its platform and serving up ads. It’s the latter which is a surprisingly important part of its business model (though there have been signs of this shift) and which is a major focus of much of the text in the S-1 filing. Last year, this advertising and subscription revenue share was nearly $50 million out of its $400 million in total revenue, and half of its platform revenue, and that accounted for essentially all of its growth in 2016. In that sense, though Roku on paper looks like principally a hardware company, it’s in some ways more like a Facebook or a Google – a company that collects millions of data points on its customers (18TB of uncompressed data per day) and will use that to target advertising. In that sense, Roku is an unusual player in the streaming space, given how many modern streaming services eschew advertising, but sees itself as a key beneficiary of the move of TV advertising dollars from traditional channels to streaming. This is going to be a fascinating IPO to watch and I’ll have plenty more analysis on Roku in the next few days.
Spotify Signs Deal with Warner Music, Paving Way for Going Public (Aug 24, 2017)
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Spotify is Talking to the SEC About its Planned Direct NYSE Listing (Aug 21, 2017)
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Spotify Has 60 Million Paid Subscribers (Jul 31, 2017)
The Financial Times reports that Spotify has hit the 60 million paid subscriber milestone, a fact that has now been confirmed by the company’s press site, where it also says it has 140 million active users in total, suggesting 80 million free users. It had previously reported 50 million paid users in early March of this year, suggesting it took just under 5 months to add a million subscribers, while Apple Music added around half that over the same period. It’s been fascinating to watch Spotify’s growth accelerate in the aftermath of Apple’s launch of its competing service, as streaming takes off as the dominant form of music consumption and paid subscriptions generate the vast majority of streaming revenue. That’s indicative of Spotify’s success in both establishing itself as the de facto standard in the market and creating social features that help win new subscribers, and also at signing partnerships with wireless carriers and others who help promote discounted subscriptions. As Spotify’s financial results for last year show, its average revenue per paid subscriber has been dropping rapidly, something I suspect has continued this year. But it’s the paid business that’s profitable on a segment basis, while free streaming loses money, which is why I suggested in a piece for Variety last week that it ditch the free tier. I’m only partially serious about that – the free tier remains by far Spotify’s best marketing tool, but it also remains a point of contention with the music labels, among which Warner is the remaining holdout in signing a new long-term deal.
via Financial Times
Roku Said to be Preparing 2017 IPO (Jul 13, 2017)
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Snap Inc Share Price Falls Below IPO Price for First Time (Jul 10, 2017)
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Spotify Finally Readies an IPO…That’s Not an IPO – WSJ (Apr 6, 2017)
It looks like Spotify may be planning on a direct listing rather than an IPO, which could happen by the end of the year. What that means is that it would simply start listing its shares on the public markets without a formal public offering or opening up new shares for sale. That would presumably meet the IPO requirements in its latest debt agreements without the expense or other overhead associated with a traditional IPO. That, in turn, makes it look like Spotify really doesn’t want to list in traditional fashion but now has little choice but to work towards that goal, with this route as a compromise of sorts. It would presumably provide the needed liquidity for investors who wanted to sell out as well, though without the normal process there would potentially be a lot more uncertain and instability in the share price.
via WSJ
Spotify nears music deals to open path to IPO – Financial Times (Mar 16, 2017)
Spotify’s deals with the music labels have long been a barrier to achieving profitability and therefore also a major barrier to an eventual IPO, especially because many of its relationships have been operating on a very short-term basis rather than being locked in longer term. It sounds like there might finally be light at the end of the tunnel, mostly because Spotify is finally caving on perhaps the single biggest sticking point in its relationship with the labels: the differences between the paid and free versions of its service. Spotify has, in fact, steadily eroded those differences, which used to be more significant but now amount mostly to a lack of ads, while the labels have long wanted Spotify to increase the differentiation between the two as a way to push users to the paid their and therefore compensate artists at a higher rate for their music. As I argue in the Streaming is Saving Music narrative, it’s not really streaming as a whole but more narrowly paid streaming which is helping the music industry thrive at present, and so those labels have every incentive to push that tier of service. On the other hand, Spotify has used that free tier very effectively as a funnel to create eventual paid subscribers, and the labels also want Spotify to IPO so they can get a return on their investments, which is why they’re finally showing some willingness to compromise too.
via Financial Times
Snap’s shares pop after $3.4 billion IPO – Reuters (Mar 2, 2017)
Snap’s IPO was widely expected to come today, and it ended up being a great debut for the stock, which rose 44% by the time the market closed, though it’s lost a little since and seems to be fairly volatile. As I’ve argued, the IPO itself comes at an extremely risky time for Snap and its investors, because there has been slowing growth but not enough time to see whether that growth will rebound, making future growth uncertain. The pop today wasn’t a surprise – the market has been so hungry for a major tech IPO for such a long time, and Snapchat is such a hot property, that retail investors chasing the next big thing were always going to jump in in a big way. At this point, Snapchat’s growth could still recover and it could go on to become one of the big success stories of the 2010s, or it could become another Twitter – there’s really no way to know at this point.
via Reuters
Snapchat Parent Snap Inc. Sets Valuation at $19.5 Billion to $22.2 Billion as IPO Approaches – WSJ (Feb 16, 2017)
It’s hard to avoid the sense that this valuation coming in at the low end of the previous target range is a sign of dampening excitement in the Snap IPO following the release of the S-1 and other worrying signs. That’s a sign of a certain amount of humility and realism from the company, which is a good thing. It’s still a massive valuation for a company at Snap’s stage of maturity, and it’s always possible the valuation will come down still further (or go up) following the roadshow, as investors get to kick the tires a little more. I’m more curious than ever what happens when the IPO finally kicks off because – as I wrote the other day – Snap is debuting at a terrible time in its history.
via WSJ
It’s not just Google — Snap has a $1 billion cloud services deal with Amazon, too – Recode (Feb 9, 2017)
Snap has filed an amended version of its S-1 IPO filing, and it’s added a few extra tidbits here and there. This Recode piece picks up on the most notable: earlier this month, Snap signed a deal with Amazon’s AWS which is worth at least $1 billion over 5 years, for redundant infrastructure (i.e. as a backup to its primary reliance on Google’s Cloud). Unlike the Google commitment, which requires a steady minimum of $400m spent per year, this deal ramps from a minimum of $50m in 2017 to $350m in 2021 (which is probably about how much Snap spent with Google in 2016). That’s a rapid growth rate, and implies that this level of redundancy may be new for Snap, perhaps triggered by investor concerns over its sole reliance on Google. Combined, that’s a minimum $3 billion commitment for just these two infrastructure companies over the next five years, which is about seven times its 2016 revenue – that’s a big commitment and increases the risks associated with slowing growth. Also new in the S-1/A are a couple of paragraphs intended to reassure investors about the multi-class stock structure and the disclosure they will receive with their Class A shares, as well as some expansion on its slowing user growth and the lower engagement levels its Rest of World users exhibit relative to its US and European users.
via Recode (Snap’s S-1/A here)
Snap Publicly Files for an IPO and Reveals Financial and User Data (Feb 2, 2017)
The long-awaited Snap S-1 was released this afternoon just as Amazon and GoPro were reporting earnings, so it’s been busy. I tweeted some of the most interesting tidbits I saw at first glance earlier, but will do a deep dive for a blog post at some point in the next 24 hours too. Some highlights: the company is growing very rapidly in revenue terms, as it ramps ARPU fast, but still makes 88% of its revenue from North America, even though a majority of users are overseas. User growth has been decent, ending 2016 with 160 million daily active user (its only user base measure), but has slowed in recent months, which Snap blames on both a poor Android update and competitive moves (such as Instagram Stories, though it’s not mentioned by name). It loses money in massive amounts – there’s no clear path to profitability here any time soon, even with rapid growth, as cost of revenues alone outweigh revenues. Engagement is mentioned 103 times in the filing, as was widely anticipated, but the only measure mentioned beyond DAUs is time spent, and it’s not provided on a consistent basis. That’s a worrying sign at a time when Snap needs to be demonstrating that its users are not just using the app daily but spending more time in it. Other tidbits: Apple is mentioned in a list of competitors, and Google is Snap’s cloud provider, with a massive commitment to future spending with the company. This blog post goes into a lot more depth on the filing.
via Snap’s S-1 filing (more coverage on Techmeme)
Spotify may delay IPO to 2018 as it rethinks licensing deals – TechCrunch (Feb 2, 2017)
As I’ve argued for some time now, it doesn’t bode well that Spotify, despite being the largest paid streaming music service in the world, doesn’t seem to be able to turn a profit. A big part of the problem is that its relationships with labels dictate sharing a very high percentage of revenue with them, which leaves Spotify with very little margin to cover all its other costs. It sounds like Spotify is now considering postponing what was to have been a 2017 IPO by another year while it goes back to the labels to renegotiate those problematic deals. The TechCrunch piece linked here suggests than appetites for IPOs of companies without profits has diminished, but that isn’t really the problem here – Spotify’s real problem has been that there hasn’t been an obvious route to profitability even if all its current growth trends continue – unlike a SaaS business with no profits, there’s no obvious growth lever that turns things around eventually. It’s Spotify’s fundamental business model that’s the problem here, and absent renegotiated contracts with the labels it’s hard to see how that changes.
via TechCrunch
Warning Signs Abound As Snap Barrels Toward IPO – BuzzFeed (Feb 1, 2017)
Yet more signs that Snapchat is suffering both as a result of Instagram’s recent feature additions and perhaps because of broader cloning of its feature set by local alternatives in Asia. We’ll hear from the horse’s mouth shortly how Snap sees these changes, and it’ll have to work hard to refute these negative signals about engagement and growth in its app when it releases its public IPO filing shortly. The narrative around Snap is quickly turning negative, and it’ll have to intervene quickly to reset it (if it’s able to do so).
via BuzzFeed
Instagram Stories is stealing Snapchat’s users – TechCrunch (Jan 30, 2017)
This would be very bad news if it turns out to be true – celebrities and those who manage celebrity and other accounts on Snapchat claim they’re seeing a significant reduction in views of their Stories on Snapchat as a result of both Instagram’s launch of its own Stories feature and Snapchat’s move to kill the Auto-Advance feature for Stories in its own app. This kind of thing is always worth taking with a pinch of salt – the ranges discussed here are very broad, and some of the data might be outliers – but the trend seems to be consistently downward, and is backed up by some app download data as well. The positive spin from Snap here would be that it’s actually focusing engagement more by only showing users the Stories they actually choose to see, but I’m not sure investors will buy that. Again, any day now we should have some real data from Snap to go on to evaluate engagement and usage, but this is another specific concern they’ll need to address in the S-1 filing. In the meantime, more evidence that Facebook and Instagram’s strategy here is paying off, and that when Facebook broadly launches its own Stories feature the impact could be even more severe.
via TechCrunch
Snap plans to publicly file for its much-anticipated IPO late next week – Recode (Jan 27, 2017)
I’m so looking forward to this filing being made public – it’s always a lot of fun to suddenly be able to dive deep into a formerly private companies finances and metrics. I’m very curious as to what they show and I’ll certainly write an in-depth analysis when I’m done investigating. The things I’m most interested in are revenue run rate and profitability. Snap has been trying to get commitments from media buyers to spend more in 2017, but I’m not sure there will be any evidence of that in the filing, which will typically be backward- rather than forward-looking. I’m assuming Snap isn’t profitable, but just how profitable and what the trajectory looks like there are big questions – Twitter famously still isn’t profitable several years after its IPO, while Facebook is one of the most profitable tech companies out there, so this is another area where Snap will want to demonstrate it’s more like the latter than the former.
via Recode
Snapchat Is in Talks for Big Ad Deals Ahead of IPO – WSJ (Jan 25, 2017)
Another day, another story about Snap trying to grow its ad revenue, this time focusing on getting up front commitments from major ad agencies’ ad buying arms. Given how nascent Snap’s ad business is, convincing potential investors that it has a predictable run rate for ad spend is critical to a successful IPO, so getting some promises from major buyers to increase spending in 2017 would be a useful first step. But of course that increased spend will only come if the ROI is there, which has been the other piece of this puzzle for Snap over recent months, trying to demonstrate that advertising on Snapchat can be more than just speculative.
via WSJ