The ultimate shock of Lyft means that it's time to separate wheat from the IPO of the chaff.



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The enthusiasm for IPOs is rapidly fading as offers come to the market and reality sets in.

It took less than two weeks for the euphoria of the IPO to cool down. Lyft's shares (LYFT are now down 31% since their initial deal on March 29. The decline began on the second trading day, but was accelerated by the announcement after the close on Thursday that Uber, its much larger rival, eventually filed its own Securities and Exchange Commission bid.Lyft dropped 1.8% on Friday to a new closing low of $ 59.90.

Uber is probably the name that investors in the sharing economy really expected. We can therefore expect them to switch their shares against Lyft as soon as Uber's shares become available. There will probably be expressions of preference similar to those of the year.

On the numbers alone, Uber certainly appears as the strongest bet. Uber has recorded an operating loss of about $ 3 billion on a $ 11.3 billion business figure in 2018, against a loss of nearly $ 1 billion. from Lyft on a business turnover of just over $ 2 billion.

Uber's massive loss looks better in another aspect: its accumulated deficit of about $ 7.9 billion represents just over twice the $ 3.6 billion deficit with which Lyft arrived on the market. Thus, the loss of Uber was more effective.

Pinterest, the photo sharing service, has not yet priced, and might find it difficult when it will do so despite decent economic conditions. It seems very likely that society will fall into the Twitter trap (TWTR – Get Report) of being simply a niche in the social field.

The monthly "active users" of Pinterest, an average of the number of people connected to the site, probably increased by 22% in March, reaching 291 million, the company predicts. This corresponds to a growth rate of about 27% in 2018 and a growth of 36% in 2016.

Twitter had a difficult growth to maintain when it reached this level. In the spring of 2014, Twitter had 230 million UAM when it was made public, but Twitter had grown by almost 40% at the time. The use of Twitter has capped at 321 million in December and the company will stop disclosing this number after the March quarterly report.

Pinterest is currently seeing significant financial improvement. Its net loss for 2018 has significantly decreased compared to 2017, reaching $ 63 million against $ 130 million. And its gross profit margin is very good at 70%.

At the top of the proposed range, $ 17, the company will be worth $ 9 billion, or 11.9 times the revenue earned. If you consider Pinterest to be an advertising game, it certainly has a much higher multiple than the advertising giants Alphabet (GOOGL – Get Report) and Facebook (FB – Get Report), or publishers such as the New York Times (NYT – Get Report). .

Will investors stay tuned to see how the growth of MAU is evolving? There is, after all, another advertising story, perhaps more interesting, that of Amazon (AMZN – Get Report), which is just starting to take shares on Google and Facebook.

On the basis of very few data points, investors in the technology IPO market are more comfortable with companies that sell software, rather than those with disruptive ambitions like Lyft or Pinterest.

On Friday, PagerDuty's two technology debuts, P & D and Tufin Software Technologies (TUFN), continued to add to their earnings, with PagerDuty breaking the barrier on Thursday, opening 53 percent above its bid price. 3.3% Friday at $ 39.50 Tufin opened a slightly less impressive rate of 30% over the IPO price but gained an additional 10% on Friday.

Both look like good businesses, but are still quite small in terms of revenue. In the case of Tufin, technology investors have probably started to look into a security technology offering since Zscaler (ZS) last year, whose shares have more than doubled since the beginning of spring latest.

Tufin has a stellar gross margin of 85% and was almost profitable in 2018 on a net basis. The company is expected to be very profitable as revenues continue to grow, but with $ 85 million in sales last year, Tufin still has some way to go to prove that it can become a force majeure .

PagerDuty can be thought of as a kind of twilio mix (TWLO – Get Report) and enterprise software, capturing "signals" from data and routing them to a location where data can be used effectively. There is a thirst for everything with a whiff of artificial intelligence, and PagerDuty has it. Last year, PagerDuty had generated only $ 100 million in revenue, with growth of 48%.

Of course, there is one important factor that can make you forget about winners and losers: mergers and acquisitions. The tech giants remain afflicted with cash and easy credit. They could certainly pay a premium for any young public company, be it a winner or a loser in commercial terms.

Never count the effect of acquiring these new broadcasts.

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