Vonage IPO

mesowarny writes "The street writes: Vonage Holdings, moved to become the first major Internet telephony player to go public by filing Wednesday to raise up to $250 million via an initial offering of stock and named a Tyco International executive as CEO. Our revenues were $18.7million in 2003, $79.7million in 2004, and $174.0 million for the nine months ended Sept. 30, 2005," the company's prospectus says."While our revenues have grown rapidly, we have experienced increasing net losses, primarily driven by our increase in marketing expenses. From the period of inception through Sept.30, 2005, our cumulative net loss was $310 million. Our net loss for the nine months ended Sept.30, 2005, was $189.6million. During the same nine-month period, our marketing expenses were $176.3million."

Comments

Marketing expenses taken in perspective:

[Jim Logajan]

A few items to keep in mind with regard to Vonage's marketing expenses:

Vonage can cut way back on them without losing existing customers. They are not unavoidable operating expenses.

If a company intends to be as large as the incumbents, they'll need equivalent marketing - regardless of their current number of customers.

Vonage could "grow" its revenue so that its relatively fixed high-profile national marketing expense becomes a much smaller fraction of its expenses without reducing its actual marketing expenses a dime. Remember that the amortized cost for the first customer of a startup company that spent $100 million developing its products is $100 million per customer. If the customer growth is exponential while the marketing expenses are linear, the amortized cost declines rapidly with time.

The more important numbers to worry about are the operating costs per customer, not necessarily the acquisition cost for the earliest customers, which can be misleading.