Groupon worth 'as much as $25 billion' Online daily-discount provider Groupon is rumored to be talking with banks about a public offering that would value it at as much as $25bn. According to "two people with knowledge of the discussions", Bloomberg reports, the IPO would be "unlikely to assign Groupon a valuation of less than $15 billion", with $25bn being the …
"A company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is."
Here we go again - plenty of short-term profit potential, but be sure to bail out before the bubble bursts. We used to be able to go a few decades between these bubbles - it appears that, with Internet time, we've shortened the cycle to a few years.
like yet another bubble being blown up. I thought they were just another one of those crappy spam advertisers that people just ignored. I guess some people fell for their spiel though but $25bn? Let's see where they are in another 2 years. Anyone on here signed up with them? Do they have assets of any worth? Or is it all just hype and hot air?
I fail to see how a company with no tangible physical assets can be worth so much. I said the same about LastMinute when it was worth more than Sainsbury's and was pooh-poohed by people who told me that I didn't understand and I should shut up... but look what happened there.
As others have said this is just another bubble...
... well in some way you probably do - you are bound to be affected by your bank, pension provider who may well be buying into this kind of deal thanks to the money printed by central banks looking for returns above 0.5% no matter how tenuous.
Valued at != value of assets. That said, value and worth are always defined by "what you can get for them" or "what the market will pay". Talking the value up, even tautologically, is perfectly legitimate. The stockmarket seems to go mad over the potential for earnings and especially for the potential for rise in the share price even though evidence tends to suggest that over time dividends are more rewarding than share price growth.
Groupon does seem to offer its customers (advertisers) some value - coupons and discount schemes are a respectable business model - and I was surprised to see a friend of mine who does not jump on the bandwagon (she uses Opera and does not have a Fuckbook account) had recently printed out some kind of groupon coupon (man, that sounds so shit). So there is awareness out there. Internet valuations all seem to be about scale as there is an understanding that margins are paper thin - Google and Amazon can attest to this - but they do exist and having leading market share is damn good way to keep the competition out as you need more than 50% to make any kind of money.
As for the IPO - just hope your bank is on the selling side.
I have a green piece of paper here that I have valued at $10 million but I'm happy to sell it to you for $5 million. Do we have a deal?
Anyway, with everyone else jumping on the 'deal of the day' bandwagon (O2, Vodafone and now Facebook) it will only be a matter of time before that market is glutted.
Groupon 'prints' money.
There is no product.
They have established their brand.
They have increased their local presence in multiple markets and have built a network of relationships with local and national businesses.
They hold patents, while of questionable merit, they established an artificial high barrier to entry.
So yeah, they get a higher valuation than a company that has tangible manufacturing capabilities.
The interesting thing is that with such a high market valuation, they'll have the capital to get in to the LBS (Location Based Services) biz and compete against Google, Nokia, Apple, etc ...
Thanks for the info but do you really think they will be able to compete with the big boys simply because they are using LBS?
They have already been fined by OFCOM for flase advertising by bigging up their coupns which are one day only offers which ALWAYS require a significant purchase at the beginning. It's like when newspapers offer save £5 when you spend £50 but on a larger scale. Chase Manhattan and Bloomberg, among others, are far too quick to give huge valuations to companies that still haven't even made a profit. Lets see if anyone even remembers them other than for this ridiculously overpriced valuation in 2 years. All the newspapers are getting into this biz at the moment (or are they just frachises of Groupon?) and it seems like a very small bubble that will soon pop when people get sick of the conastant bombardment of emails and vouchers that they will never use.
So my Groupon email arrives - I don't actually remember requesting one, but what the hey - and I'm about to trash it, when I see they're offering 10% off airport parking. I click through the link and I'm offered a deal to park at Stansted for exactly the same amount it costs to go direct to the cark park shark's web site.
How does that work, precisely? The only advantage would seem to be that by purchasing parking space through Groupon, I get to enrich their CEO by another couple of quid.
$25 billion? Is there a coupon I can use to get a discount on that?
"If that higher figure is reached, it would put Groupon's value above that of Google's when the online ad broker and search-engine leader went public in 2004 for a piddling $23bn"
Not as piddling as Fords $660m IPO. Oh wait, what's that? Someone just told me about this whole new concept called "inflation"....
PS "upto" $25b? You mean like "upto" 20Mbs-1?
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