Interesting Links for 8-1-2011

[andrewducker]

• Radiohead: are they any good? (A sceptic listens to the first five albums - funny and well written)
  (tags: music radiohead reviews)
• The S stands for Simple (Thankfully I don't have to work with SOAP, but if you ever have, this is hilarious)
  (tags: humor xml programming software web soa soap)
• The cowardly fudge behind the rhetoric of Control Orders (This being the bit that worries me about today's speech)
  (tags: law uk rights freedom government)
• Nick Clegg's speech on civil liberties. More of this please - reminds me why I couldn't vote for Labour last time around.
  I'm nervous, of course, of what the actual laws will be. But this is generally pointing in the right direction.
  (tags: uk government law rights freespeech libel terrorism)
• Glasgow pantomime dress broke Geneva Convention
  (tags: law uk)
• Facebook made profits of $350m in 9 months. Valued at $50Bn. Not sure that multiplier makes sense to me...
  (tags: facebook business web2.0)
• Harry Potter plagiarism case dismissed. (They claimed that she copied the idea of wizards travelling on trains. WTF?)
  (tags: harrypotter law books)

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

On the topic of FB: we can extrapolate their profits for the whole of 2010 as being something like $0.5Bn (they're still growing, so Q4 will be bigger). Revenue will probably be on the order of $1.5-2Bn.

In a sane market, the multiplier for a valuation is revenue x 8; in a bubble market it's revenue x 30-50. I figure a sane valuation for FB would therefore be somewhere in the range $15-20Bn, taking into account the prospects for further growth (which aren't as good as they would be if FB hadn't already grabbed 500M users).

A $50Bn valuation is either making disturbing assumptions about FB's future growth prospects -- disturbing because it implies FB can milk its user base enough to triple the per-user revenue, or can triple in in size to 1.5Bn users -- or it's a bubble valuation.

[andrewducker]

Aaaah. I thought that share value was generally done from profits, not revenue. If it's based from revenue then it's still massively inflated, but not quite so insanely.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I may be wrong, but I thought it was revenue that was used. (Way back in 1994, when SCO IPO'd, it was turning over $200M a year, but had never made a quarter's profit until 6 months before the offering -- profits mean you have to pay tax and dividends, so they were always ploughing the surplus back into expansion. They had to show a pro-forma profit after the IPO -- otherwise, no dividends for shareholders -- but IIRC the valuation for the run-up to IPO was based on their turnover.)

[andrewducker]

Interesting. I'm used to P/E, which tells you something about how long it's likely to take before dividends pay back your investment. I guess that with FB their EBITDA might be signigicantly higher, which would mean that in the long term they're in good shape and will be able to extract more money.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Profits don't necessarily mean dividends - more and more companies are doing share buybacks instead of dividend payments, which has several advantages, including tax efficiency for shareholders (in many jurisdictions), perceived as less of a signal of Total Disaster if cut in later years, and directly increased share price - hence a harder takeover target (and less desirable since the cash pile is reduced). Oh, and of course, the execs might just have a direct incentive to raise the share price.

Also, in an economic downturn, an investment in expanding the business is a chancier proposition, but a share buyback is still guaranteed to raise the share price, and risk-averse execs might prefer to use cash for the safe option.

(I'm sure you know all this, and better than me - just expanding.)

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Facebook opens up a whole world of valuation theory and practise.

If I were Zuckerman I'd take $50bn soon as look at you.

Personally I'd take less than an x8 multiplier of profit on Facebook. I think it is vulnerable to generic competition and therefore becoming a commodity.