E Ink seems more valuable than $215M. It's a great idea, they own the patents and they are already manufacturing components. They are growing in a new sector. Or expanding into netbooks and laptops depending on who you talk to. I have to imagine that this sale is as much about getting a hold of infrastructure for faster growth as it is about making money.
That said, how much of our idea of valuations come from web apps? I was thinking about the number $215M and realized the only reason that it seems small is because Facebook is valued at $6B, or YouTube was bought for $1.6B. Outside of software, I can't think of companies that are really valued at these amounts, unless they make power plants or airplanes or some other giant necessity.
Is this how much companies are actually worth and we're all just in such a ridiculous bubble that we can't see it, or did these guys get desperate and cash out?
I'd say it's probably a mix of the two. The economy is currently rather crappy and we have no clue of the current situation of the company, perhaps they care more about getting the technology out there than making insane profits. However, the deal probably included shares in PVI and we're just not privy to that information either.
Facebook has a user base of ~200 million active users. They have an income of $300 million and only 700 employees. When you consider companies that have a fraction of their customer base, selling for $6B is pathetic. Ford, despite losing money like an alcoholic loses body fluids, has a revenue of ~$150 billion with only 5.5 million customers. Ford gets an average of $27,000 per customer 'per year' (this is based off their revenue divided by their customers, I'm trusting that with a company so old these numbers average out the money you'll give to Ford later in your vehicles life through parts, etc; so essentially the average person pays $27,000 through a vehicles lifetime), Facebook gets a total of $1.50 per customer per year. Compare Facebook to Google, who get roughly $58 per customer per year. So even by internet standards, Facebook is worthless for its user base, it hasn't capitalized at all on its potential market like Google has.
Companies like E Ink only have a handful of 'customers' and deal with large shipments. They're probably more comparable to a regional meat distributor than an online industry. They ship their product to only a handful of companies and then it's out of their hands.
The only reason so many of us know who E Ink is, is because it's used in products we care about. I believe the type of ePaper that will get a company worth into the billions will be manufacturers of color ePaper like used in the FLEPia. This offers instant conversion into low cost computers, cell phones and mp3 players.
# of customers is a horrible metric to determine the value of something. It's a holdover from the as the first metric a company could use in the bubble to get value when it's not making money and says nothing about how much that customer interacts with the company or how much value they derive from it. I might go to dmv.org every year vs. several times a day, but I am just one "customer" of both sites.
