2nd Mar, 2009
Toluna share price quite robust
Just done a quick review of share prices in online research..everyone’s suffering but some are holding up better than others.
Toluna are valued at £81m with a price earnings ratio of 36. This is monstrously high these days and is where YouGov used to be. I presume the market expects profits to be shooting up above the £2.27m mark reported as it’s hard to explain otherwise in this environment.
BrainJuicer have the next highest PE ratio with a valuation of £11.6m on profits of £693k. It’s a healthy ratio and I think Brainjuicer are a healthy company with a good steady business from branded clients and a reliable stream of research innovations coming from John Kearon and his team.
ResearchNow seem to be suffering by comparison to Toluna (somewhat surprisingly as I’d award RNow the quality high ground). As of today Research Now are valued at £40.8m with a PE ratio of 11. Profits were £3.69m - someway above Toluna’s and I’d be surprised if Toluna had caught them up. All I can think of is that Research Now is growing too slowly perhaps, and getting sucked into price competition, whereas maybe Toluna’s move into the US panel (CommonKnowledge) and their newish community site are really working for them..Still Toluna look a risky buy at this level…I’d not touch them.
Finally we have the former poster child, YouGov, bringing up the rear and being punished for poor communication with the City and poor performance. They’ve overpaid for purchased panels, been very slow on integration and their shotgun innovation is not really paying dividends. That said with similar sales to ResearchNow, an amazing brand from a respondent point of view and a UK election brewing in the next 12 months or so, perhaps they are a little undervalued.
Who’s to know though? Weird times and the FTSE did fall 5% today down to a level last seen in 1995. Ho hum..
Posted by: BlowFly
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