Daily deal leader Groupon (GRPN) is slated to go public today, selling 34.5 million shares at $20 each, which will raise $690 million in exchange for a 5.4% stake in the company. Combine a popular Internet start-up with a very low number of shares being offered (floating 5% of all shares is historically a very small IPO) and demand will far outstrip supply. We may not see a record setting first day pop, given the eleven-figure starting valuation, but the stage will be set for a solid jump at the open on Friday. And even without any first day gain, Groupon will be valued at about $12.75 billion.
As one of Groupon's 16 million repeat customers, I was interested to dig into their IPO prospectus because I have already seen my use of Groupon decline meaningfully since I signed up to receive their daily deal emails last year. To me, Groupon has several headwinds facing their core business.
First, Groupon is dealing with many small business merchants who complain that they lose money when running a Groupon campaign. If businesses really see Groupons as a way to mint money immediately, they are mistaken about what role the deal campaign should play. A Groupon deal should be viewed as a marketing expense, not a profit center. A business should use Groupons to get prospective customers in the door. After that, just like any other marketing tool, it is the business's job to treat them well and provide a good service, which should encourage repeat business. It will be those recurring customers that will grow your business long term and generate profits.
Generally speaking, profit margins for small businesses are hardly ever high enough to make a 50% discounted transaction profitable to the business. If you offer $50.00 Groupons for $25.00 each and only keep $12.50 per voucher (Groupon keeps the other half), the odds are slim you will make a profit initially. Unless it only costs you no more than $12.50 to offer $50.00 in goods or services, you are going to lose money. Let's say you lose $20.00 per Groupon in this case. The real question should be, is a new customer coming through your doors worth $20 to you? The only way to answer that is to look at other marketing options you have. Do they cost more or less than $20.00 per new customer generated? If the answer is more, then Groupon is a worthwhile way to market to prospective new customers.
Along the same lines, I think Groupon will struggle once they have exhausted most of their small business merchants in any given city. As the example above shows, Groupons themselves are not money makers, which makes it less likely that a small business is going to want to run multiple campaigns. As a result, when you run out of businesses, your deal quality declines and fewer Groupons are going to sell. Groupon is probably facing these issues today, as the business is three years old and many businesses have already used the service. It is my belief that new businesses should probably strongly consider running a Groupon campaign, given that the biggest obstacle for new businesses is lack of awareness. But honestly, there are not likely enough new businesses cropping up to support strong long-term growth of Groupon's core daily deals business. As a result, merchant growth could very well hit a wall sooner rather than later.
Groupon's IPO prospectus provided a lot of data that investors may want to use to try and value the company. For instance, as of September 30th, Groupon had 143 million email subscribers. How many of those have ever bought a Groupon? I was pretty surprised by this number actually... the answer is 30 million. Only 20% of the people getting these emails have ever bought one, and that is a cumulative figure for the last three years! Investors trying to place a value on Groupon's subscribers may want to forget the 143 million number, as only 30 million are generating revenue for the company.
The numbers get worse. Of those 30 million people who have bought at least one Groupon (Groupon calls them "customers" as opposed to the 143 million "subscribers"), only 16 million are repeat customers. So only about 10% of the people who get the emails have bought 2 or more Groupons since the company launched. This is hardly a metric that screams "loyal customers that generate strong repeat business," which is what investors would want to see.
Why is this important? I think a good way to try and value Groupon (if you even want to bother) is to place a dollar value on each paying customer. After all, Groupon is not unlike a subscription service like Netflix or Sirius XM Radio, aside from the obvious fact that a paying customer of the latter two businesses are more valuable because they generate guaranteed revenue each and every month. In fact, both Netflix and Sirius get about $11.50 per month on average from their paying customers. Interestingly, Groupon earns about $11.90 in revenue for each Groupon it sells, but they are not even close to selling every customer at least one Groupon per month on a recurring basis. As a result, it is correct to conclude that investors should value a Groupon customer far below that of a Netflix or Sirius customer.
Which brings us to the stock market's valuation of Groupon versus Netflix or Sirius. Each of Netflix's 23 million subscribers are worth about $200 based on current stock prices. Sirius XM, with 21 million subscribers, is valued at about $600 per subscriber (considerably more than Netflix because Sirius XM has higher profit margins). How much is the market paying for each Groupon customer at the $20.00 per share IPO price? Well, $12.75 billion divided by 30 million comes out to $425 each.
It is not hard to understand why skeptics do not believe Groupon is worth nearly $13 billion today. To warrant a $425 per customer valuation, Groupon would have to sell far more Groupons to its customers than it does now, or make so much profit on each one that it negates the lower sales rate. The former scenario is unlikely to materialize as merchant growth slows. The latter could improve when the company stops spending so much money on marketing (currently more than half of net revenue is allocated there), but who knows when that will happen or how the daily deal industry landscape will evolve in the meantime over the next couple of years.
"Buyer beware" seems to definitely be warranted here.
***Update Fri 11/04/11 8:55am*** Groupon has increased the number of shares it will sell in today's IPO to 40.25 million from 34.5 million. The figures in the above blog post have not been adjusted to account for this increased deal size.
Full Disclosure: No positions in any of the companies mentioned at the time of writing, but positions may change at any time