When games meet reality: is Zynga overvalued?

Z. Forr\'o (), P. Cauwels and D. Sornette

Working Papers from ETH Zurich, Chair of Systems Design

Abstract: On December 16th, 2011, Zynga, the well-known social game developing company went public. This event followed other recent IPOs in the world of social networking companies, such as Groupon or Linkedin among others. With a valuation close to 7 billion USD at the time when it went public, Zynga became one of the biggest web IPOs since Google. This recent enthusiasm for social networking companies raises the question whether they are overvalued. Indeed, during the few months since its IPO, Zynga showed significant variability, its market capitalization going from 5.6 to 10.2 billion USD, hinting at a possible irrational behavior from the market. To bring substance to the debate, we propose a two-tiered approach to compute the intrinsic value of Zynga. First, we introduce a new model to forecast its user base, based on the individual dynamics of its major games. Next, we model the revenues per user using a logistic function, a standard model for growth in competition. This allows us to bracket the valuation of Zynga using three different scenarios: 3.4, 4.0 and 4.8 billion USD in the base case, high growth and extreme growth scenario respectively. This suggests that Zynga has been overpriced ever since its IPO. Finally, we propose an investment strategy (dated April 19th, 2012 on the arXiv), which is based on our diagnostic of a bubble for Zynga and how this herding / bubbly sentiment can be expected to play together with two important coming events (the quarterly financial result announcement around April 26th, 2012 followed by the end of a first lock-up period around April 30th, 2012). On the long term, our analysis indicates that Zynga's price should decrease significantly. The paper ends with a post-mortem analysis added on May 24th, 2012, just before going to press, showing that we have successfully predicted the downward trend of Zynga. Since April 27th, 2012, Zynga dropped 25%.

Keywords: Zynga; valuation; social-networks; IPO; growth in competition; bubble; Facebook; lock-up (search for similar items in EconPapers)
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://web.sg.ethz.ch/RePEc/stz/wpaper/pdf/ETH-RC-12-003.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Failed to connect to FTP server web.sg.ethz.ch: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:stz:wpaper:eth-rc-12-003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from ETH Zurich, Chair of Systems Design Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Claudio J. Tessone ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).