Peter Cauwels, Didier Sornette
posted by Matúš Medo
(7 October 2011)
pdf
(285 views, 101 downloads, 1 comments )
We present a novel methodology to determine the fundamental value of firms in
the social-networking sector based on two ingredients: (i) revenues and profits
are inherently linked to its user basis through a direct channel that has no
equivalent in other sectors; (ii) the growth of the number of users can be
calibrated with standard logistic growth models and allows for reliable
extrapolations of the size of the business at long time horizons. We illustrate
the methodology with a detailed analysis of facebook, one of the biggest of the
social-media giants. There is a clear signature of a change of regime that
occurred in 2010 on the growth of the number of users, from a pure exponential
behavior (a paradigm for unlimited growth) to a logistic function with
asymptotic plateau (a paradigm for growth in competition). We consider three
different scenarios, a base case, a high growth and an extreme growth scenario.
Using a discount factor of 5%, a profit margin of 29% and 3.5 USD of revenues
per user per year yields a value of facebook of 15.3 billion USD in the base
case scenario, 20.2 billion USD in the high growth scenario and 32.9 billion
USD in the extreme growth scenario. According to our methodology, this would
imply that facebook would need to increase its profit per user before the IPO
by a factor of 3 to 6 in the base case scenario, 2.5 to 5 in the high growth
scenario and 1.5 to 3 in the extreme growth scenario in order to meet the
current, widespread, high expectations. To prove the wider applicability of our
methodology, the analysis is repeated on Groupon, the well-known
deal-of-the-day website which is expected to go public in November 2011. The
results are in line with the facebook analysis. Customer growth will plateau.
By not taking this fundamental property of the growth process into
consideration, estimates of its IPO are wildly overpriced.
The Econophysics Forum
welcomes your comments
this is really interesting! in my master thesis for my MBA I came up with the exact same valuations! I just took a very different way to calculate it: basically I looked at the online market in the biggest economies worldwide and made the assumption that a certain reach (i.e. number of internet users registered on fb) implies a certain market share. the more users are registered on fb, the more ads will be sold. discount rate: 13,8%, revenues in 2017: $14 bln, profit margin: 31%.
discounted cash flow per december 31, 2010: $26,7 bln
worst case scenario: $15 bln
best case scenario: $39 bln
I put it under a creative commons licence. you can get it from here: http://david.priv.at/blog/?p=239
but anyway, the whole point in the high facebook valuation is not what fb earns now, but what fb MIGHT earn in the future - not with ads, but with the tecniques (and the implied user data) it MAY develop.
another reason for the high fb valuation is based on the partecipants on this price rally: "social media experts", banks, investors... they all do have a lot of interest in pushing fb's valuation.