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February 28, 2007
Dotcoms Do Better On US Stock Markets
We stumbled across this chart over on Jeremy Fain's Tech It Easy blog that compares the PE ratios of enterprise software companies to Internet stocks in Europe, China, and the US.
What the chart also illustrates is that the US public markets put a much higher valuation on dotcoms than the Euro markets.
We already had a good idea that this was the case after following Vistaprint (not covered in the above chart) for a while.
The European-founded online business printing company (financed by French VCs and angels) has traded on NASDAQ since Sept 2005 and currently has a PE ratio of almost 70 and a market cap of $1.6B.
But one area of technology where the public markets are providing a NASDAQ level to European tech companies is alt energy.
Q-Cells headquarters clan in the solar panels that enable its €3.6B mkt cap
This kind of valuation means that such companies have larger amounts of cash to invest, acquire rivals with, and to expand more quickly.
We've written about Q-Cells, which just raked in another half a billion euros as a result of an oversubscribed bond issue this week, and Conergy in Germany - but you could also look at REC Group, the Norwegian solar cell startup that controls much of its own supply chain, which has a PE ratio of 154.
So the quick conclusion looks to be that floating a dotcom in the US - even with the constraints of SOX -- is the thing to do if possible -- and get that alt energy startup onto a stock market in Europe.
Read - Web 2.0 Stocks Twice As Expensive (jeremy fain blog)
Posted on February 28, 2007 05:20 AM | Posted to Being European | Permalink
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