Tag: IPO

Flips and flops for PE shops

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

There are flips that fly, and flips that flop. Consider the two recent exits by private-equity (PE)-owned companies Skype Technologies and Freescale Semiconductor. One deal basically quadrupled the price of the portfolio company, while the other company is still lingering at a value of less than half its original purchase price. Granted, that ‘headline’ calculation misses some of the nuances of the holdings and their returns to the PE shops, but it’s nonetheless a solid reminder that deals need to be done with a focus on the ‘demand’ side of the exit.

For Skype’s PE ownership of Silver Lake Partners, Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, the $8.5bn all-cash sale to Microsoft came less than two years after the consortium carved the VoIP provider out of eBay for just $2bn. The deal stands as the largest ever purchase by Microsoft, and the double-digit price-to-sales valuation suggests Redmond had to reach deep to take Skype off the board. Skype had filed to go public, but was also rumored to have attracted interest from Google as a possible buyer.

On the other hand, there wasn’t much demand for Freescale, which was coming public after undergoing the largest tech LBO in history. Freescale priced its recent IPO some 20% below the bottom end of its expected range. That had to be a painful concession for the PE owners of the company: Blackstone Group, Carlyle Group, Permira Funds and Texas Pacific Group. The club paid $17.6bn in mid-2006 for the semiconductor maker, loading up the company with billions in debt just as the market tanked. Freescale, which still carts around about $7.5bn in debt, has lower sales now than when it was taken private four years ago.

Imperva impervious to consolidation

Brenon Daly1 Comment

Contact: Brenon Daly

The next exit for a database security vendor appears likely to be an IPO. Word is Imperva has picked Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank Securities to lead its offering, with a prospectus likely to be filed in the next few weeks. The Redwood City, California-based company is thought to be running at roughly $60m in revenue.

If Imperva does indeed go public, the IPO would cap a run of a half-dozen deals in a sector that has seen purchases by some of the biggest technology providers on the planet. Among the companies that have bought their way into the database security market over the past two years are Oracle, IBM and McAfee. That’s not to say those big players have been paying big prices.

With the exception of Guardium’s sale in November 2009 to IBM, which we valued at $232m, the other transactions have been modest ones. And the most recent deal has been less than modest: BeyondTrust likely paid only a few million dollars for Lumigent last week. In fact, as we tally the aggregate value of all M&A in the database-monitoring space, we suspect that the total bill will be less than the value Imperva creates in its IPO.

Looking past the losses at Carbonite

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Is Wall Street ready to buy into a company that spends $1 on advertising to bring in just $2 in bookings? That’s one of the key questions around Carbonite, a fast-growing online backup vendor that just filed for its IPO. (We looked at Carbonite’s planned offering in an in-depth report, including projecting its likely valuation when it does hit the Nasdaq later this year.) Carbonite has more than doubled revenue in each of the past two years. And while that is an eye-popping growth rate, it has been fueled by an equally eye-popping spending on advertising.

Consider this: Carbonite shelled out $24m on advertising last year on its way to recording $54m in bookings. (For those of you who like old-fashioned, by-the-book accounting, the $54m in bookings in 2010 equaled a scant $39m in actual revenue for the six-year-old startup.) And to be clear, that $24m was straight advertising spending, which is just a portion of the $33m in sales and marketing spending that it rang up last year. Obviously, that’s not a sustainable ratio, at least not for a technology company that also needs to spend a few million dollars on servers and other equipment each quarter and hopes to run profitably. (For its part, Carbonite hasn’t posted anything close to black numbers.)

That’s not to say that Carbonite won’t be a hit with investors when it does go public. Bulls can point to the fact that the service has attracted more than one million paying users, and those that use it tend to stick with it. (Carbonite puts its retention rate at 97%.) And on the buyside of the IPO, Wall Street has been willing to look past red-stained income statements if the growth rates are high enough. As evidence, we might point to the mid-March offering of Cornerstone OnDemand, a company that has a similar financial profile to Carbonite, though it competes in a vastly different market. After pricing its offering above range and soaring onto the market, Cornerstone currently trades at about 18 times trailing revenue

Demandware to test demand in public market?

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

After a pair of billion-dollar deals over the past half-year removed two old-line e-commerce vendors from the Nasdaq, an on-demand startup is rumored to be looking to replenish the ranks on the public market. Several sources have indicated that Demandware has picked underwriters and is set to file its IPO paperwork shortly, with Goldman Sachs & Co and Deutsche Bank Securities running the books. The filing, if it comes, would continue a trend of offerings by relatively small subscription-based companies. Demandware is expected to do about $40m in revenue in 2011.

Founded in 2004 and based near Boston, the company provides an e-commerce platform for more than 150 customers, including Barneys New York and The Jones Group. Demandware’s investors include local VC firms General Catalyst Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.

The IPO for Demandware would come at a time of consolidation in the e-commerce industry, with big buyers paying big prices. Late last year, Oracle acquired Art Technology Group for $1bn, paying the highest price that ATG shares had seen since 2001. (ATG, which was founded in 1991, counted more than 1,000 customers.) And then earlier this year, eBay handed over $2.4bn for GSI Commerce. That stands as the largest Internet transaction since February 2008.

Tripwire pulls the plug on its IPO

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Almost exactly a year after Tripwire formally filed its IPO paperwork, the security vendor has opted for the other exit, a trade sale. Thoma Bravo, a buyout shop with a number of other security and management companies in its portfolio, expects to close the acquisition of Portland, Oregon-based Tripwire this month. Terms weren’t disclosed but we understand that Thoma Bravo is paying about $225m. The decision by Tripwire to sell isn’t a surprise, any more than the fact that a buyout shop is its new owner.

If it had gone ahead with its IPO, we suspect that Tripwire would have had a rough go of it as a public company. Wall Street looks for growth, and while Tripwire has put up steady growth, it hasn’t been explosive growth or particularly valuable growth, at least in the eyes of portfolio managers. In 2010, Tripwire bumped up its overall top line 16% to $86m, primarily driven by increases in maintenance revenue and, to a lesser degree, consulting work. Collectively, those lines of business, which now represent more than half of Tripwire’s total revenue, rose 25% in 2010 – three times the rather anemic growth rate of 8% in license sales. (License sales actually flatlined in both the third and fourth quarters of 2010.)

The lagging license sales certainly wouldn’t have helped the company attract interest from strategic buyers. We noted earlier that nearly four years ago Tripwire came very close to selling to BMC. Since it filed its prospectus, we’ve heard that both Quest Software and CA Technologies looked at Tripwire. Still, in our view, Tripwire has a financial profile that should fit well inside a PE portfolio: some 6,000 customers; seven consecutive years of revenue and operating income growth; a rock-steady – and growing – maintenance stream of about $40m; and roughly $10m in cash flow per year.

A warm welcome on Wall Street

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Against a backdrop that has the major stock market indexes at their highest level in about three years, investors have apparently signaled that they are ready to take a chance again on new issues. A pair of IPOs came to market Thursday at significantly higher-than-expected prices, and promptly surged in aftermarket trading. Collectively, the offerings for Responsys and 21Vianet raised a healthy $274m for the two companies.

In the hotter of the two IPOs, Chinese hosting company 21Vianet Group sold 13 million American Depository Shares at $15 each. (That raised $195m for the company, half again as much money as it originally planned to raise based on the midpoint of its initial range.) In the aftermarket, shares were changing hands at about $21 each. (We’ll have a full report on the company and its outlook in tonight’s Daily 451.)

Meanwhile, on-demand marketing software vendor Responsys also found a warm welcome on Wall Street. The offering, which we expected to be strong, raised $79m for Responsys. The company priced its 6.6-million-share offering at $12 each, roughly 30% above the midpoint of the initial range. Investors bid up the stock to about $15.50 in afternoon trading. With 44.1 million shares outstanding, Responsys garners a value of some $680m, slightly more than 7 times 2010 sales and almost 5x our projection for 2011 sales.

A responsible debut valuation for Responsys

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Reversing a trend that has seen many of the major marketing software providers disappear inside larger players, Responsys is ready to step out onto the public market. The on-demand company, which filed its IPO paperwork just four months ago, plans to sell 6.6 million shares at $8.50-10 each. It is likely to begin trading Thursday. (See our full preview of the offering.)

At the high end of the range, Responsys would be valued at roughly $450m. That appears to be a fairly conservative valuation, at least when compared with recent acquisitions and even current trading multiples in the sector. We might suggest that Responsys – a company that’s solidly in the black and posting 40% growth – would garner a premium on its debut.

If it does indeed hit the market in the neighborhood of a half-billion dollars, Responsys will essentially match the exit prices over the past eight months of two of its main rivals. Last August, Unica got taken out by IBM for $523m (equity value), while Aprimo sold to Teradata for $525m in December. However, when we compare the three vendors, Responsys is growing at more than twice the rate of either of the two companies that went in a trade sale. (Aprimo had been on file to go public back in 2007, but the Credit Crisis scotched those plans.)

Despite the premium that we might expect for Responsys’ growth rate, the company is likely to start life on the Nasdaq at about 5.5 times trailing sales, roughly the midpoint of the valuations in the sales of Unica and Aprimo. Further, it would just match the current market valuation of Constant Contact, a low-end multichannel marketing firm that went public in October 2007.

Cornerstone: the newest — and priciest — HCM vendor

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

So much for the ‘debut discount.’ Cornerstone OnDemand hit the market Thursday at an eye-popping valuation, going against the recent trend toward conservative pricing for new issues. The human capital management (HCM) vendor priced its shares at $13 each, above the indicated range of $9-11 each. (Goldman Sachs & Co and Barclays Capital are leading the IPO.) By early afternoon Thursday, the stock was changing hands at about $19.

The offering gives Cornerstone one of the richest valuations of any recent IPO. At $19 per share, the company’s market cap is roughly $900m. That’s 15 times trailing bookings (not sales) and likely in the neighborhood of 9x projected bookings. (Our math: Cornerstone reported 2010 bookings of $61m, up 74% from the previous year. Assuming that the growth rate comes down a smidge to 60-65% for 2011, that would put Cornerstone’s full-year bookings at $100m, give or take.)

Cornerstone’s valuation vastly outstrips what the market says rival Taleo is worth, and even puts it ahead of SuccessFactors, which had been the HCM industry’s ‘favorite child.’ (That’s been the view on Wall Street, anyway.) SuccessFactors, which went public in late 2007, currently garners a $2.7bn market cap, roughly 10.5x trailing bookings and about 8x projected 2011 bookings. We should note that both SuccessFactors and Taleo are about four times the size of their newest rival on the public market. But for now, both of them are looking up at Cornerstone.

At long last, Open Text makes a BPM play

Brenon Daly

Contact:  Brenon Daly

More than a year and a half ago, we noted that Metastorm was looking to buy its way into some adjacent markets such as risk and compliance or perhaps collaboration. The planned shopping trip would have come after the business process management (BPM) provider pulled its IPO paperwork. At the time, however, we wondered if the would-be IPO candidate might not head to the other exit: a trade sale.

Specifically, we floated the single name of Open Text, which we noted had consolidated much of its core enterprise content management (ECM) market but still appeared to be losing deals to rival vendors with more robust BPM offerings. However, we thought that valuation might make it tough to bridge the bid/ask spread between the two sides. In most of its dozen deals over the past decade, Open Text has paid somewhere in the range of 0.5-1.5 times trailing sales for its acquisitions. That’s true for its most visible purchases, including deals that saw it gobble up rival ECM firms Hummingbird in August 2006 and Vignette in May 2009, as well as add image capture software maker Captaris in September 2008.

As it turns out, valuation didn’t necessarily snag Open Text’s significant acquisition to bolster its BPM credentials. The company said late last week that it will hand over $182m in cash for Metastorm. In a conference call, Open Text indicated that Metastorm was generating $70-75m in sales, implying a valuation of about 2.5x sales for the BPM provider. That’s a fair bit richer than the valuation that the Canadian consolidator has paid in the past. However, we suspect that guidance assumes a bit of revenue write-downs and (perhaps) a bit of sandbagging. The reason? Metastorm said in mid-2009 that it was above that level of revenue in 2008 and targeting $90m in 2009. In its IPO filing, Metastorm reported $60m in sales for 2007.

Motricity’s equity activity

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Although shares of Motricity have been trading on the Nasdaq since mid-June, it’s only been in the past few weeks that most of the action has taken place. We have already chronicled the difficult birth of the company, which had to trim both its offer size and price to go public. Debt-heavy Motricity ended up raising only half the amount that it expected in its June IPO.

Born under a bad moon, Motricity appeared destined to live out a life of quiet woe on the public market. And for the first three months, that’s exactly how it played out for the mobile data platform provider. Shares changed hands in the single digits. Then the stock took off, tripling from September to November. (That run was enough to tempt Carl Icahn, a significant shareholder in Motricity, to look to lighten his load in December. However, the activist investor pulled the planned secondary last week.)

For its part, the company has found its own use for equity: an acquisition. Earlier this week, Motricity picked up mobile advertising and analytics startup Adenyo for $100m upfront and (perhaps) another $50m in an earnout. Terms call for Motricity to use an unspecified mix of cash and stock to cover the bill. Adenyo, advised by Citadel Securities, did get a collar on shares as part of the final consideration. But for now, the once-volatile shares of Motricity have been holding steady at about $20 each, which is at the high end of the collar’s range.