Vonage Funding & IPO: Great Expectations
(ntop partners with cable msos to provide them with cable telephony)
om malik
voip blog
5/8/05
gigaom.com
Vonage Funding & IPO: Great Expectations
Paul Kedrosky, a professor at the University of California, San Diego says that the recent $200 million venture capital infusion into Vonage is nothing but great expectations. He believes that Vonage’s valuation is at a point, where it would need a king of fools to bail out the investors. “It’s hugely optimistic,” Mr. Kedrosky told the times. He added that the amount meant that any initial public stock offering for Vonage would have to raise at least $3 billion to justify the latest round of financing.
Sandy Miller of 3i, that pumped in another $10 million in this round, discounted all plans of an IPO. he thinks this is nothing but a slam dunk. But that’s not what the other Times VoIP story of the day says. At their current rate, the cable companies may soon eclipse the market leader, Vonage, which has 600,000 subscribers. “Brand has everything to do with it: long-term stability, willingness to stand by the product, quality of product,” Steve Kirkeby, a telecommunications analyst at J. D. Power & Associates, said of cable companies. (NYT)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
vonage reponse
reuters.com
(out on Sunday)
actual cablevision and time warner cable telephony subscribers (last week)
The New York-area cable powerhouse's unlimited minutes phone service now has 400,000 customers, and is adding about 7,000 more a week, the company reported Thursday. A majority of those customers are replacing local phone service from incumbent local phone operator Verizon Communications, Cablevision said.
On Wednesday, Time Warner Cable's Digital Phone service reported 372,000 customers at the end of its first financial quarter in 2005, and executives at the company say the total is rapidly closing in on 500,000. |
