People worried about the next dangerous tech bubble haven’t been able to point to much evidence in the public stock market of late, with many of the biggest companies trading at below-market multiples.
Instead, they’ve groused about optimistic venture capital firms overvaluing some of the most well-known private startups. Firms like Uber, Xiaomi and Dropbox are “worth” $10 billion and up, at least according to the valuations implicit in their most recent VC rounds.
But recent initial public offerings, instead of confirming those possibly overvalued levels, have actually questioned them. The latest victim of public market skepticism is online storage provider Box, which announced pricing for its upcoming IPO at a top value of $1.6 billion, below the $2.4 billion valuation of its most recent round of private capital six months ago.
And Box is hardly alone. New Relic (NEWR), which makes cloud-based analytical software, and datacenter software provider Hortonworks (HDP), were both priced to go public at less than their last round of venture capital raising. Both later traded above the VC valuation levels, but not by much, indicating few signs of euphoria. A round-up by the Wall Street Journal last month found 30 companies went public in 2014 at levels below their most recent venture capital highs.
Meanwhile, as noted, there are few signs of froth among the longtime leaders of the tech industry. Apple (AAPL) trades at a price-to-earnings ratio of 17.3, below the 18.6 ratio of the entire Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. It’s forward P/E ratio, based on analysts' earnings forecasts, sits at 12.7 versus 17.2 for the S&P 500.
The story is much the same for other tech giants. Google’s (GOOGL) forward P/E stands at 14.3, Microsoft’s (MSFT) at 14.6 and IBM’s (IBM) at a paltry 9.0.
Almost a year ago, there were some pockets of concern in tech stocks, particularly among cloud software firms. Anyone remember Castlight Health (CSLT), the IPO that priced at over 100 times its trailing revenue and then tripled in its first day of trading?
But Castlight has cooled off, dropping 74% since its first day of trading, and the entire cloud sector has, as well. While the S&P 500 was just recently hitting record levels, Bessemer Venture Partners’ monthly index of 40 publicly-traded cloud companies stood at 2,280 in December, 12% below its previous high last February. And companies in the index are now valued at 5 times their expected 2015 revenue compared with almost 7 times revenue at the peak.
They may not be bargains, but there’s little evidence of a 1999-2000 kind of disaster brewing, at least for public investors.