Tag Archives: Pandora Media

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

What's Next for Pandora

Leave a comment

By Jeremy Bowman, The Motley Fool

Filed under:

Shares of Pandora Media had their best day as a publicly traded company last week, jumping 18% after its results beat Wall Street‘s estimates. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights:

  • Revenue in the quarter grew 54%, to $125.1 million
  • Mobile revenue jumped 111%, to $80.3 million, outpacing mobile listener hours, which grew by 70%
  • Mobile devices represented 79% of listener hours

A quick, back-of-the envelope calculation reveals that nearly all of Pandora’s additional revenue came from mobile devices. Pandora is a mobile company, above all else, and has clearly staked its future on the new medium. Pandora’s business model has been widely panned because of rapidly growing content costs, but all the while it’s been cleverly developing a unique niche. Its advertising-based model offers something that competitors like SiriusXM Radio and Spotify don’t, and Pandora can capitalize on mobile’s potential to offer advertisers something they can’t get from other partners.

CEO Joe Kennedy said on the conference call that Pandora can offer advertisers “new and unique technological capabilities,” such as “targeting, interactivity, and measurability” that they can’t get with traditional radio. It’s easy to imagine future development, such as Pandora taking advantage of GPS capabilities to offer listeners precise location-specific ads.

The disproportionate growth of mobile revenue also proves that the strategy has legs. Each new user is being leveraged to grow revenue at a faster pace, demonstrating that the company is making progress in cracking the radio ad market. As Kennedy reminded listeners on the call, the U.S. radio ad market is worth $15 billion a year in sales. Considering that Pandora already has an 8% share of the domestic radio market, the company should be doing sales of over $1 billion, if its sales were in proportion to its listening hours. Instead, fiscal 2013 revenue, i.e. its last four quarters, was just $427.1 million.

Another bright spot was the growth in subscription revenue. Though the category still just makes up 12% of total revenue, subscription sales grew by 75% in the quarter, outpacing overall top-line growth. For the year, subscription sales grew just 50%. At the end of February, the company announced it would cap free mobile listening at 40 hours a month, which should drive increased subscription revenue going forward.

Not all a bed of roses
Despite the growth in mobile and the market‘s strong response, there were still some reasons to be concerned. Pandora continues to lose money. For the quarter, it posted an adjusted loss of ($0.04) a share, and guidance was also a bit light. For the current quarter, management sees revenue between $120 and $125 million, a sequential drop, and an adjusted EPS loss of ($0.10) and ($0.13). For 2013, the midpoint of its EPS guidance is break-even, with revenue between $600 and $620 million.

Content acquisition costs in the quarter again outpaced revenue growth, increasing 59%. While that figure had been a principal focus of the market in past reports, analysts seemed to ignore …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

Who's Who at Pandora

Leave a comment

By Jeremy Bowman, The Motley Fool

Filed under:

Though it’s difficult to measure, leadership is one of the most important areas to look at when assessing companies. Visionary leaders can make all the difference in industries where there is little competitive advantage to be won. Business strategy, capital allocation, and employee culture vary from company to company, but they start at the top. In this excerpt from our premium research report, we take a closer look at Pandora Media‘s leadership.

Leadership
Pandora is led by CEO Joe Kennedy, who joined the company in 2004 from E-LOAN, where he served for five years as chief operating officer. Before that, he was the VP of sales, service, and marketing for Saturn, where he helped grow the brand to over $4 billion in revenue and established it as No. 1 in customer satisfaction in the industry.

Founder Tim Westergren still plays a key role in the company as chief strategy officer. Before starting Pandora as the Music Genome Project, Westergren spent 20 years in the music industry as an award-winning composer and musician. Westergren created Pandora in part to help emerging artists find an audience, and he considers himself the company’s chief evangelist.

Pandora’s management is rounded out by Chief Technology Officer Tom Conrad, who is in charge of product management; CFO Steve Cakebread, who was previously chief strategy officer at salesforce.com; Chief Revenue Officer John Trimble, who oversees advertising operations; and Chief Marketing Officer Simon Fleming-Wood, who joined Pandora in 2011 after serving in a similar capacity at Cisco.

If you found the above information useful, I encourage you to pick up a copy of the complete report, which features in-depth research on the company’s opportunities and risks as well as key areas. To get started today, all you have to do is click right here.

The article Who’s Who at Pandora originally appeared on Fool.com.

Fool contributor Jeremy Bowman has no position in any stocks mentioned, and neither does The Motley Fool. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Copyright © 1995 – 2013 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

(function(c,a){window.mixpanel=a;var b,d,h,e;b=c.createElement(“script”);
b.type=”text/javascript”;b.async=!0;b.src=(“https:”===c.location.protocol?”https:”:”http:”)+
‘//cdn.mxpnl.com/libs/mixpanel-2.2.min.js’;d=c.getElementsByTagName(“script”)[0];
d.parentNode.insertBefore(b,d);a._i=[];a.init=function(b,c,f){function d(a,b){
var c=b.split(“.”);2==c.length&&(a=a[c[0]],b=c[1]);a[b]=function(){a.push([b].concat(
Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments,0)))}}var g=a;”undefined”!==typeof f?g=a[f]=[]:
f=”mixpanel”;g.people=g.people||[];h=[‘disable’,’track’,’track_pageview’,’track_links’,
‘track_forms’,’register’,’register_once’,’unregister’,’identify’,’alias’,’name_tag’,
‘set_config’,’people.set’,’people.increment’];for(e=0;e<h.length;e++)d(g,h[e]);
a._i.push([b,c,f])};a.__SV=1.2;})(document,window.mixpanel||[]);
mixpanel.init("9659875b92ba8fa639ba476aedbb73b9");

function addEvent(obj, evType, fn, useCapture){
if (obj.addEventListener){
…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

Why Pandora Shares Boomed

Leave a comment

By Brian D. Pacampara, Pacampara, The Motley Fool

Filed under:

Although we don’t believe in timing the market or panicking over market movements, we do like to keep an eye on big changes — just in case they’re material to our investing thesis.

What: Shares of Internet radio service Pandora Media soared 19% today after the company’s quarterly results and guidance topped Wall Street expectations.

So what: The company’s fourth-quarter loss widened to $14.6 million, but a 54% spike in revenue, coupled with upbeat guidance for the full year, suggests that management’s growth strategy is right on track. Of course, that makes Pandora’s other big announcement that longtime CEO Joseph Kennedy will be leaving the company all the more confusing to investors.

Now what: For the full year, management now sees adjusted earnings ranging from a loss of $0.05 per share to a profit of $0.05 per share on a revenue range of $600 million to $620 million. “Pandora has been hiring top talent in local radio markets to further increase our share of the $15 billion radio ad market,” said Kennedy in a statement. “We are now effectively the largest radio station in almost every major market and begin fiscal year 2014 with extraordinary momentum.” However, when you consider the fact that Kennedy won’t be there to channel that momentum into long-term profitability, I’d wait for some of the exuberance to fade before buying into that bullishness.

Pandora has won millions of devotees among music fans but few supporters on Wall Street. The online jukebox seems to be redefining the way we consume music, a transformation that’s only likely to grow. But high royalty rates and competition from all corners threatens to silence the company. Can Pandora translate success with its listeners into a prosperous business model that will deliver for investors? Learn about the key opportunities and potential pitfalls facing the upstart radio streamer in The Motley Fool’s new premium research report. All you have to do is click here now to subscribe to this invaluable investor’s resource.

var FoolAnalyticsData = FoolAnalyticsData || []; FoolAnalyticsData.push({ eventType: “TickerReportPitch”, contentByline: “Brian D. Pacampara, Pacampara”, …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance