{"id":1984,"date":"2006-05-24T13:54:06","date_gmt":"2006-05-24T19:54:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.riggedup.net\/?p=1984"},"modified":"2006-05-24T13:54:07","modified_gmt":"2006-05-24T19:54:07","slug":"vonage-ipo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.riggedup.net\/blog\/2006\/05\/24\/vonage-ipo\/","title":{"rendered":"Vonage IPO"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone knows I love Vonage&#8230; so a lot of people have been asking me if I was going to participate in their IPO.  Many where shocked to hear me say:<\/p>\n<p>No.<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t get me wrong, as a customer, Vonage is awesome&#8230; there&#8217;s no other phone service I&#8217;d ever have.  However, this is an investment decision and here&#8217;s why I was down on them:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>With BIG competition like AT&#038;T&#8217;s Call Vantage and Time Warner&#8217;s Digital phone &#8211; its going to be tough going for Vonage&#8230; for the incumbent carriers, VoIP is life or death for them&#8230; so they&#8217;re not going to down without a serious fight.<\/li>\n<li>At about $17\/share &#8211; Vonage is saying that they&#8217;re worth around $2.5billion.  I don&#8217;t know about that &#8211; especially when you consider that Vonage has never turned a profit.<\/li>\n<li>Don&#8217;t forget the whole <a href=\"http:\/\/ants.wynand.com\/2006\/05\/13\/162\/\" target=\"_blank\">Net Neutrality issue<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>To me, its clear that Vonage is involving their customers in the IPO because they want to build excitement and demand for their stock&#8230; the problem is that 3 days before the closing of the &#8220;customer round&#8221; they sent out an email reminder that it was &#8220;closing soon&#8221; and that we&#8217;d better hurry up and get our money in&#8230;  which sounds like they had problems getting people to sign up.  So Econ 101 says that when there&#8217;s no demand, prices go down.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So what ended up happening?  Lets go see&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Shares of Vonage Holdings (VG), the Internet telephone pioneer, dropped in their trading debut Wednesday after pricing late Tuesday at $17 a share, the middle of the expected range.<br \/>\nShares of Vonage fell $2.31, or 13.6%, to $14.69 in late trading on the New York Stock Exchange. <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/money\/industries\/telecom\/2006-05-24-vonage_x.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Investors drop Internet phone pioneer Vonage <\/a><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And my favorite:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>&#8220;Internet phone service provider Vonage Holdings Corp.&#8217;s initial public offering encountered shareholder static Wednesday morning, and appeared <b>headed for the worst IPO debut in two years.<\/b>&#8220;<\/i><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theconglomerate.org\/2006\/05\/vonage_ipo_is_a.html\" target=\"_blank\">Vonage IPO is a Train Wreck <\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Perhaps Buffett was right &#8211; maybe investing (or not investing) in things you understand the most is a good thing. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone knows I love Vonage&#8230; so a lot of people have been asking me if I was going to participate in their IPO. Many where shocked to hear me say: No. Don&#8217;t get me wrong, as a customer, Vonage is awesome&#8230; there&#8217;s no other phone service I&#8217;d ever have. However, this is an investment decision [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.riggedup.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1984"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.riggedup.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.riggedup.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.riggedup.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.riggedup.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.riggedup.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1984\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.riggedup.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.riggedup.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.riggedup.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}