I don't know why the market thinks this deal is so good. Vaya's...

I don't know why the market thinks this deal is so good.

Vaya's ARPU is $22/month and amaysim just paid $500/customer ($70m EV / 140,000 customers).

amaysim's gross margins (revenue - network costs) are 28% and amaysim run a fairly tight ship so I can not imagine that Vaya's would be any better.

To give them the benefit of the doubt lets say Vaya has a gross margin of 30% meaning that with $22 ARPU they have a gross profit of $6.60/month. That's before all the overheads of rent, customer service staff, marketing and so on.

How do you get ROI on a $500 investment per customer when your gross profit is $6.60/month?

To be clear, $6.60/month x 12 = $80/year.

That's the most you could expect to make if you fired every staff member, shut the offices, shutdown IT, marketing etc.

Then again, $500/customer is less than amaysim itself was valued at... before today's announcement $405m market cap against 718k customers was $564/customer so I guess Vaya is "good value" in Mr Market's eyes.

I'd be really interested to know where people see amaysim in 5 years.

amaysim is a healthy, positive cashflow business but I can't understand how the market is valuing it so highly when it is 100% dependent on Optus (read: margin squeeze). At the same I recognise that Optus also needs amaysim because the loss of over 900k customers would put a massive revenue hole in Optus' own mobile business. But the smart play for Optus is simply to squeeze amaysim as hard as it can which is a little too easy to do given that amaysim's numbers are fully public.

Hence I can't see any nice outcome for shareholders... am I missing something?