Morning Report: The Angry Birds IPO Gets Its Wings Clipped

Morning Report: It turns out that an Angry Bird isn’t worth as much as the media thought.

After media speculation that Rovio’s IPO would value the Finnish gaming shop at around $2 billion, reality has caught up with the Angry Birds maker. According to reporting by Reuters, the company’s initial IPO price range gives its shares a maximum value of around half that total.

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To wit:

The preliminary price range of 10.25 euros to 11.50 euros per share announced on Friday would give Rovio a market value of 802 million to 896 million euros, or $950 million to $1.1 billion.

In case you are behind, none of this is as crazy as you are imagining. Rovio is a company with material, growing revenue, a multi-platform strategy to leverage its gaming IP, and the firm produces goodly sums of adjusted profit. (We dug into its initial IPO news on Equity in case you want to rewind.)

Here are Rovio’s most recent numbers, per its own second quarter reporting:

• Revenue: €86.2 million (up from €44.5 million in the year-ago quarter).
• “Games” revenue grew 65 percent to €61.3 million in the quarter (year-over-year).
• “Brand Licensing” grew 242.6 percent to €24.9 million (film incomes bolstered results).
• Adjusted EBITDA totaled €31.6 million.
• Actual GAAP-profit is unclear.

So the company has some chops. And on paper it feels cheap given that we know the upper-end of its expected public value range.

If you quickly take Rovio’s H1 revenue result (€152.6 million), double it to get an annual number and divide it into the $1.1 billion valuation, you wind up (after some currency conversions) with a revenue multiple of, wait for it, 3.

Why is Rovio only worth a revenue multiple of three when even enterprise SaaS can expect a 5 or 6 price-sales multiple? Because gaming companies have a way of losing steam when one of their franchisees slows down. Given that Angry Birds is Rovio’s center of gravity, there is risk that the firm can only milk so much out of the franchise.

Next up: where does Rovio price, and will it manage an above-range pricing?

From The Crunchbase Daily: 

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