Liquidity preferences are also critical in allowing companies to grant employee stock options at valuations substantially below what the Series A investors pay. If liquidity preference disappear, the IRS will likely take a much closer look at low strike prices on options.
As of Q4, the average paying user gave them $17.32 per month in Gross Bookings. And they had $632m of Gross Bookings in the quarter, meaning they had 12.2m paying users by my count, giving them an average of $17.32/mo each.
12.2m paying users out of 408m MAUs, or about 3% of the total.
His point is that the company has a net cash position of $3bn, meaning someone who pays $5bn for the entire market cap of the company would immediately receive $3bn back in cash, making the real price effectively $2bn
But he is saying the $5bn already includes a discount for the cash you will get back. The market knows it has 3bn in cash lying around, so the market reckons that all of Blackberry's future profits and its on hand cash, are worth $8bn today, but that includes the $3bn of cash, so it adjusts the shares down to be $5bn - effectively saying the market thinks Blackberry can generate another $5bn worth of dividend-able profit for the rest of its life. For a company with an EBITDA of 1.3bn thats about 3 years.
So, the time value of money. Also, as foobarqux commented, this leads to a silly valuation of the very capitalized lemonade stand. If a similar-but-broke lemonade stand would be worth $1000, most people would be extraordinarily willing to pay $1000 for 1% of the very capitalized lemonade stand. It would make them millionaires!
Market capitalization is just the valuation implied by the current share price. (share_price * n_shares).
For a less ridiculous hypothetical, we know that BBRY has $3bn in cash right now. Supposing that it instead had $10bn in cash, its valuation would not be the same, it would be $7b higher. Its stock price (and equivalently its market capitalization) would reflect that, because the stock market is a place where people who disagree about the how to value the company go to make trades they believe are favorable. People who go to the public markets and act on the belief that ($10b in cash + a niche mobile phone business) should be valued at $5b would be rare. They would also be very wrong.
The current valuation of $5b implies that the niche phone business is worth $2b and the $3b in cash is worth $3b.
> Err, ok I am missing something from my basic economics - I was pretty certain the market cap of a company was its projected lifetime profits.
No, it is what the shareholder can, in principle, "take out" of the company, appropriately discounted. For a going concern, without excess cash, that is going to be, to a first approximation, something like discounted earnings.
> So if a lemonade stand has 3bn in cash it's done pretty well selling lemonade surely?
Not necessarily. When starting a business you need cash, even pre-revenue. Even if the cash were generated entirely from the business somehow the business endeavor may no longer be valuable. Maybe people don't like lemonade anymore. Maybe lemons have gone extinct. In those cases future earnings are zero.
If someone wanted to acquire the lemonade business what would they pay? Probably not $3bn because that would just be moving numbers around (there is no reason normally to buy cash). They would pay whatever they could get out of the lemonade business proper (assets, future earnings). The $3bn would be returned to the shareholders.
The significance of this should not be understated. This shows compelling evidence of real voter fraud that swayed the republican primary in Romney's favor and could easily sway a close general election.
Can anyone offer up a legitimate reason that the % of votes for a particular candidate should correlate with precinct size?
