To: BostonView who wrote (102 ) 11/17/1998 1:18:00 AM From: Louis Riley Read Replies (4) | Respond to of 206
Draw your own conclusions, please. But I am sure that I am not the only one running these numbers through a spreadsheet... Here is a little back-of -the-envelope noodling regarding INFO's near term valuation prospects: Here are the sequential quarter to quarter (not year over year) growth rates for the past 4 Q's: Q4 97/Q3 97: 47% Q1 98/ Q4 97: 5% Q2 98/ Q1 98: 39% Q3 98/ Q 2 98: 16% That is what is commonly known as “explosive growth” in Wall Street parlance. Total revenues for the quarter ended 9/30/98: $4,148,000. I think extrapolating the most recent quarter's revenues forward with a 15% sequential growth rate would be pretty conservative. Such an extrapolation would yield revenues of: Q4 98 $4,770,200 Q1 99 $5,484,730 Q2 99 $6,308,590 Q3 99 $7,254,878 _________ $23,818,398 Total Forward 12 Month Run Rate Revenues Now, what kind of forward Price/Sales multiple does one put on these revenues? 5X? That is pretty cheap these days. If so, 5 X $23,818,398 = $119,091,990 Market Cap $119,091,990 / 11,040,900 fully diluted shares (includes the Preferred Stock conversion into 1,400,000 shares of common announced today) = ~$10 3/4 / share current value. Think a 5X forward P/S is too conservative? A 10X would yield a ~$21 1/2 current share price. But, so far, I have only addressed valuation prospects based on the company's current business. So, what is the recently launched Company Sleuth worth? In today's Investor Business Daily Infonautics' Executive VP Josh Kopelman gives a goal of signing up more than one million subscribers in the year ahead. I would submit to you that these subscribers are likely to generate excellent “stickiness”, returning to the site every day, and even several times a day. So what are 1MM very sticky users worth? Let's again be conservative and say $100 each based on the low end of current user values at other sites. (http://fnews.yahoo.com/isdex/98/11/11/morning_981111.html) That adds another $100,000,000 in market cap, or ~$9 / share. So, we could easily see a ~$20 stock price in the near term using some pretty conservative assumptions. If the market gets a little more aggressively optimistic (not a stretch given the valuations being assigned to EWBX, TGLO, et al), we could see $30 or much, much, more just as easily. This is an extremely low probability position short sale, IMO. Long and loving it, Louis