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It’s clear AirBnB is quickly becoming a known entity among travelers
and a more established mainstream brand and is poised to become more valuable than Marriott, Starwood, and Expedia. At first glance, the valuation looks rich, but the data suggests it might be right.
Guest post from ValueWalk.com
Valuation
AirBnB is reportedly raising a $1B round at a $24B valuation, a jump of 140% over its last reported 2014 valuation. If the deal is successful, it would make AirBnB the third-most valuable unicorn company in the world after Xiaomi and Uber.
We believe some unicorns are not appropriately valued…so we compared AirBnB’s valuation numbers against those posted by several related or comparable public-market companies. Specifically, we looked at Marriott, Starwood, Expedia, Wyndham, and HomeAway and AirBnB would rank first in valuation when compared to these companies, just above Marriott, which sports a market capitalization of $21.1B. AirBnB would be 8x as valuable as HomeAway, its most similar competitor, which trades at around $31 per share for a market cap of less than $3B. Wyndham, Expedia, and Starwood all trade at valuations between $10B and $14B.
Price-to-Sales Ratio
When we look at multiples, AirBnB does look very richly valued at $24B. Its multiple would be more than quadruple the size of HomeAway’s, which has a price-to-sales ratio of 6.6. The other companies all have multiples between 1.6 and 2.5 price-to-sales.
Revenue Growth
PSG Ratio
If we combine the price/sales (PS) and revenue growth rates (G), we get what we’ll call a PSG ratio which puts the companies on similar footing. By this measure, we see AirBnB falls into a reasonable range compared to these public-market peers.
Interest
Interest in the service is increasing rapidly. As the Google Trends chart below shows, the term “AirBnB” recently surpassed the search term “Marriott” in Google search popularity.
Conclusion
With consumer interest growing and sales growth in the triple digits, AirBnB doesn’t look like a bloated unicorn to us.
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The original article, a guest post on ValueWalk.com is presented here by the editorial team of munKNEE.com (Your Key to Making Money!) and the FREE Market Intelligence Report newsletter in a slightly edited ([ ]) and abridged (…) format to provide a fast and easy read.]
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