OpenTable IPO math doesn’t work.

by Kris_Tuttle on February 27, 2009

We have been doing some back­ground research on OpenTable in prepa­ra­tion for a pre-IPO report which we often do for tech­nol­ogy and related issues.  (This time we even have a full inter­ac­tive model behind the analy­sis from a new research part­ner that we think will fur­ther enhance the inter­est we get.)

Oddly enough we are just get­ting started when we ran into the prover­bial ele­phant in the room.  Is the fully-diluted share count on this puppy really 250 mil­lion shares. (!)  We’re still going to fin­ish up and pub­lish our analy­sis and model but how on earth can such an IPO be priced given that cur­rent year rev­enues will fall in the range of $50M?

The sim­ple math of the IPO is that if the deal is priced at $1 the shares will be at 5x 2009 sales.  As one sim­ple dat­a­point we com­pare it to Salesforce.com which is sport­ing a TEV/Revenue mul­ti­ple of 2.8x.

We’ve looked this over a few times and keep think­ing that we are mak­ing some incred­i­ble mis­take.  It’s as if some­one for­got to put in the 1-for-10 reverse split to make the math work for the deal to get priced. 

So at the risk of appear­ing like are dazed and con­fused we put our obser­va­tion out there and hope some­one can help us to get bet­ter information. 

If the com­pany plans to do a reverse split why wouldn’t they do it before fil­ing the S-1?   In this mar­ket there’s hardly a huge rush to get filed and out there. 

A 1 for 10 begins to make poten­tial IPO pric­ing make sense but we would con­sider a much higher ratio to get the pro­jected price into the dou­ble digits.

{ 3 comments }

Ilan Sender February 27, 2009 at 4:22 PM

I am 99% sure you are right. The S-1 clearly states that the # shares after the offering is 250.2MM (as of 12/31/08). It would be a 6 sigma event to get this # wrong in an S-1.

btk February 27, 2009 at 5:30 PM

Not sure the point of this post . . . there obviously going to adjust the shares for a reverse split in a latter amendment (S-1/A). I know you guys have good backgrounds, but this is not a big deal. Perhaps it was an oversight on their part for not adjusting it prior to the S-1, but you it would have been mroe helpful if you provided more analysis on the actual business itself (I’m sure you could come up with some knocks other than the share count). Just a thought.

Kris_Tuttle March 4, 2009 at 7:49 PM

Thanks for your comments BTK, yes we are indeed planning on a full analysis of the company prior to the IPO.

I agree that doing a reverse split is easy to do but why wouldn’t you do it prior to filing? There’s no rush on this after all. Word is the deal is not going to come until late April. Normally this is done prior to filing in my experience.

Before the IPO we should have a full analysis with a working model and so on.

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