ZUO

I’ve seen this company mentioned here before but without much discussion. Zuora (ZUO) is an enterprise software company that designs SaaS applications and sells access to these applications, using a subscription business model, to client companies. Zuora’s applications are designed to automate billing, commerce, and finance operations.

It recently IPO’d in April with trading starting at $20. It rose into the mid to high 30’s a couple times with a high of $37.78 in June. It’s traded down to about $26 now.

It’s enterprise value is $2.6 billion with $168 million in revenue in 2018. This gives it an EV/S ratio of 15.5. Revenue growth was 22.6% in 2017 and 48.6% in 2018. Revenue is expected to increase 36.3% to $229 million over the next year. It’s not yet profitable but losses have been gradually decreasing from $37 million to $24 million over the past 3 years. One analyst expects it to break even on cash flow in 2020.

Here’s a positive write-up from the MF:

https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/08/11/its-time-to-get-gr…

It makes a bullish case with a comparison to the hugely successful VEEV (which I own) with the CEO following a similar path. The CEO is a former Salesforce executive (#11 employee) who left to found ZUO and owns just over 10% of shares. The company has a high glass door rating of 4.6 and high CEO approval rating of 94%. It has emerging moats from high switching costs and network effects.

It’s current addressable market is about $2 billion but this is expected to grow rapidly to about $9.3 billion by 2022 and ZUO is likely to expand into another areas.

What do others here think? Is ZUO a buy?

dave

(I hope this a decent introduction, let me know if it could be improved)

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I should have added recent 2Q FY2019 results:

https://investor.zuora.com/financial-news/press-release-deta…

Subscription revenue was up 44% yoy and total revenue was up 47% yoy.

It looks like they raised full year guidance by $7 million to $227-$230 million.

dave

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I believe ZUO was vetted to some extent either here or on the New Paradigm Investing boards fairly recently. The last earnings report was not taken well by the street fwiw.

Rob

I believe ZUO was vetted to some extent either here or on the New Paradigm Investing boards fairly recently. The last earnings report was not taken well by the street fwiw.

Rob

Thanks! I now see that there were a couple recent informative threads on NPI. The sentiment seems mixed with the conclusion that its current growth may not warrant its valuation.

I still think it has great potential and will keep it on my watch list.

dave

If I understand Zuora right, they help other companies change their business model to subscription.