SoundCloud apparently considering sellling up
SoundCloud is reportedly mulling over the idea of selling up - for the tidy sum of $1 billion.
The German company's founders and investors are looking at ways "to boost growth and profit from its user base" say unnamed sources to Bloomberg.
Despite the streaming service - who launched ad-based and paid tiers earlier this year after protracted licensing talks with major labels - valuing themselves at the dizzying amount, they're apparently struggling to attract anyone else who thinks the same. SoundCloud has some 175 million users, but the likelihood that a significant portion are paying to use the service is infinitesimal, and as Bloomberg write, SoundCloud's recent history suggests that they're not exactly flush with cash: "In 2014, the last year that SoundCloud publicly reported its accounts, sales rose 54 percent to 17.3 million euros ($19 million) from a year earlier. The operating loss at the time was 39 million euros, widening from 21.3 million euros in 2013."
The impact from SoundCloud's paid services has not been taken into account in those numbers, so maybe they're raking it in these days.
In June, Twitter invested a large sum in the company as part of a $100 million "funding round" that bumped up the overall value to $700 million. An almost 50% price increase in a month seems rather steep, doesn't it?
[via CMU]
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