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| Just Dial IPO – Is it worth investing? |
CRISIL believes that company’s business model is great. It has gone ahead and assigned a rating of 5/5 to the issue. But with Google being one of the major competitors of JustDial, we don’t agree with what CRISIL has to say. By the way, ratings should always be taken with a pinch of salt. ReliancePower’s IPO was assigned a rating of 4/5. And we all know what happened. 🙂
- Sometime in 2012, company’s CEO VSS Mani made a remark – “The IPO (initial public offering) next year will just be a liquidity event for our investors.” Nothing wrong with that. Our only concern is that if you invest in this IPO, you will be on the receiving end of this liquidity event 🙂
- We are not sure that we would like to have Google as a competitor in the businesses we invest. Just a little effort by Google in Indian markets can cause a lot of trouble for JustDial.
- The online space has very low entry barriers. Anyone can come up with a better solution than JustDial. It is a fast changing landscape. And any adverse developments on the technology front can make this stock volatile in times to come.
- With EPS of around Rs 9, JustDial would be available at multiples of 52x to 60x. And that is damn expensive!! Something like a Google trades at 25x multiples. Just imagine the growth rate which the company would need to maintain to justify these multiples!! And if we are really interested in buying something at 50x multiples, why wouldn’t some go for a much better and established businesses like HUL or an ITC?
- CRISIL’s IPO grading only looks at company fundamentals relative to peers. It tells absolutely nothing about its valuations.
- Lets talk about the safety net which company has proposed.For this, there is a defined safety net period of 180 days from the date of listing. The safety net gets triggered if the weighted average market price of equity shares in the 60 days after the safety net period gets over is lower than the allotment price. If this happens then the safety net providers, in this case promoters of the company, will buy back shares from the original retail shareholders at the retail offer price. The point to note here is that company is not offering too many shares for the retail investors. So the benefits of overpricing this IPO far outweigh the possible losses in case of trigger of safety net option. So this is more of an eyewash by the company.
- Mr Amitabh Bachchan (who has done a few ads for the company) has received 67,000 plus shares of the company at just Rs 10. Not sure if this was part of the compensation or his investment acumen 🙂 But he is getting an option to sell his shares in open market for 5000% profit. Same shares which he bought (or got) at Rs 10, is available to us for Rs 500 plus. We don’t like this 🙁
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| Lucky him Or Unlucky you? |
Not sure what retail investor’s response would be, but we are sure that we don’t like this issue. It may go up in the short term because a rising tide lifts all the boats. And with current markets looking to move up, anything might be possible. But we might get interested in this business again when prices would have cooled down [substantially]. Reason for our interest would be the uniqueness of the business, which has a negative working capital cycle. The company collects 100% of the money from its customers upfront. But no point discussing these things till share prices go down (& profits go up).
Lets see how the issue pans out 🙂