News that America Movil/Carlos Slim, the telecomms operator, has invested $40m in UK Shazam is, of course, great news. It values Shazam at c$400m although it has revenues of c£22m and is loss-making. Shazam will known to many readers and has 70m active users worldwide who just love its music recognisition facilities. Shazam is one of the apps, like Angry Birds and Instagram, which owes its success to the Apple’s App Store which celebrates its 5th anniversary this week.
As we wrote a few months ago (See UK’s Shazam heads for $1b IPO) Shazam is planning an IPO next year – indeed, at this rate, it really could well be valued at c$1 billion by then. How London could do with the excitement of a $1b tech IPO! But it looks increasingly like NASDAQ will have that honour. That’s bad (in our view) for the whole UK ecosystem – from accountants, legal advisers, PR people…and analysts. The same applies to King (a producer of Facebook games), Markit (data provider for economic surveys). Even Sophos (IT security), who we know well, is more likely to list in the US than London.
Indeed just as the UK seems to be producing a raft of IPO-able tech companies AT LAST, it seems that they are all looking across the pond for their quote. We find that very sad.
If we had just one major tech IPO, who knows what might follow?