Fair comments. Was good of Cicatris to provide this. Numbers are very important in these types of peer comparisons. The whole point here is to try to pick which company(s) share price will increase and offer the most profit to the investor.
There are of course other numbers like how long has each company been trading/trying to become profitable. Current cashflow drain is another. Growth rates, past and likely future, shares on offer and there are more.
ENG - 7 Years /FY08 $12M loss / 28% Rev Growth / 635M Shares FRE - 3 years /FY08 $8M loss / 4% Rev Growth / 187M Shares MNF - 2 Years /FY08 $2M loss / 107% Rev Growth / 53M Shares
A telling indicator is that MNF took just 2 years to build a client base of 60,000, they used $5M of shareholder funds to do this. ENG took 7 years and about $100M in shareholder funds to build their client base of 68,000. FRE subscriber nmbers are unknown but likely that FRE have spent about $30M to build a base of about 5000?
I note today that FRE finally announced more details of their Tesco interest in the UK, to quote FRE "Ms O’Donnell said Freshtel will earn ongoing call revenue from the product." Some more detail would be nice, like indicative percentages & likely numbers.
From a shareholders point of view also, ENG has 635M shares & MNF have just 53M. Dilution comes to mind here, no one likes dilution especially when placements are simply used for operating expenses as in the case of ENG & FRE.
ENG & MNF appear to be the goods. They will both benefit from the growth in VOIP, they will just attract customers in different ways. MNF know how to build quickly and efficiently, ENG are stuck in the old school ways of marketing, stick an ad up and they will come......FRE is hard to predict as shareholders can not quantify their potential deals, the most significant being the recently launched Tesco TalkWifi product. My analysis of the offering though tends to indicate that target consumers would be better off with free offerings from Fring, Nimbuzz & others though, these other offerings will not limit users to just 4 phones and will also offer Skype & other messaging products.
You simply can not have a discussion or concensus on ENG future value without considering what 58% shareholder Seven has in store for ENG. Will they try to buy it thru more placements? Sell it off and move on? Or simply continue to tread water? FRE also has this problem with Tesco as it's largest shareholder.
MNF shares are tightly held by directors and a few significant others. MNF investors seem to be there for the long run with a lot of shares held by those working the business. You just do not see churning or dumping in MNF.
I have concluded that from a "company to invest" in point of view that MNF is the safest & most predictable bet, ENG is uncertain for a decent shareholder return because of Seven and that FRE needs to remove current management & go back to the drawing board or put up some forecast revenue numbers from the Tesco product offering and allow the shareholders to pass judgement.
ENG Price at posting:
0.0¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
