Pundits used to kick around the idea of "who will buy Vonage?". We are going to find out. With the noise around patent infringement no help, the stock price has dropped to the $3 level. So Vonage's life as an independent company is drawing to a close. Now, to be sure, Vonage executives probably always assumed they would be acquired, someday. That it would be such a "distress" sale probably wasn't comtemplated, at least not initially. No cable company is going to touch it, so that leaves telecom segment players as the only conceivable "network service" buyers. It isn't so clear what value Vonage might represent to application providers. I haven't done the math yet, but at $3 a share, buying the company probably gets close to "customer acquisition cost" for at least some potential buyers with a srategic need for wireline VoIP customer base and associated platform elements. In any event, we are going to find out.
Monday, March 26, 2007
The Only Question: Who Buys Vonage?
Pundits used to kick around the idea of "who will buy Vonage?". We are going to find out. With the noise around patent infringement no help, the stock price has dropped to the $3 level. So Vonage's life as an independent company is drawing to a close. Now, to be sure, Vonage executives probably always assumed they would be acquired, someday. That it would be such a "distress" sale probably wasn't comtemplated, at least not initially. No cable company is going to touch it, so that leaves telecom segment players as the only conceivable "network service" buyers. It isn't so clear what value Vonage might represent to application providers. I haven't done the math yet, but at $3 a share, buying the company probably gets close to "customer acquisition cost" for at least some potential buyers with a srategic need for wireline VoIP customer base and associated platform elements. In any event, we are going to find out.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
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1 comment:
Vonage is a one trick pony when it comes to the telecommunications industry landscape. The power is in the bundle (voice/data/video/wireless) and Vonage is going up against established companies with big bank accounts. They also chose the least profitable segment of that bundle to go after. Voice is trending to zero, and they offer only the cheap service. They are targeting the part of the bundle that its competitors will choose to offer for free as long as they get the other three.
Who buys them? Good question, I think the telco's might kill Vonage just to watch it die.
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