Facebook has climbed out of its 2012 doldrums to a market cap of $115 billion today. So, I’ve updated my user tracking and valuation model, just for kicks.
As in my last update, user growth continues to modestly exceed the original estimates. The user “carrying capacity” now is about 1.35 billion users, vs. .95 originally (K950 on graph) and 1.07 in 2012 – within the range of scenarios I originally ran, but well above the “best guess”. My guess is that the model will continue to underpredict for a while, because this is an inevitable pitfall of using a single diffusion process to represent what is surely the aggregate of several processes – stationary vs. mobile, different regions and demographics, etc. Of course, in the long run, users could also go down, which the basic logistic model can’t represent.
You can see what’s going on if you plot growth against users -the right tail doesn’t go to 0 as fast as the logistic assumes:
User growth probably isn’t a huge component of valuation, because these are modest differences on a percentage basis. Marginal users may be less valuable as well.
With revenue per user at a constant $7/user/year, and 30% margins, and the current best-guess model, FB is now worth $35 billion. What does it take to get to the ballpark of current market capitalization? Here’s one way:
- The carrying capacity ceiling for users continues to grow to 2 billion, and
- revenue per user rises to $25/user/year
This preserves some optimistic base case assumptions,
- The risk-free interest rate takes 5 more years to rise substantially above 0 to a (still low) long term rate of 3%
- Margins stay at 30% as in 2009-2011 (vs. 18% y.t.d.)
Think it’ll happen?
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