Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Getty Images Returning to the Stock Market with an IPO?

According to the NASDAQ website (here) the Financial Times is reporting that Goldman Sachs has been retained to consider an IPO and other options. Photo Business News reported that federal regulators had approved Hellman & Friedman taking Getty private (Getty Images - Moving Forward, 3/19/08) at a rate of $2.1B (according to Forbes) and $2.4B according to the Nasdaq site. They are considering a valuation for the IPO of $4B. Getty at one point saw highs of $90+ a share in their heyday, before plummeting and then going private. With the Shutterstock IPO revealing their average stock sale of $2.05 per image in an SEC filing (as reported by Photo District News, here), how can Getty see a $4B valuation? Dubious, at best.
(Comments, if any, after the Jump)

Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.

No comments:

Post a Comment

COMMENT GUIDELINES

Every month, tens of thousands of visitors come to Photo Business News, and approximately 2,000 readers get PBN via RSS feeds. As we approach three years of blogging (in one form or another) PBN has matured, and has, as one might expect, attracted some less-than-mature readers, which, in turn, turns to commenters with their own agendas.

Following are our Terms of Service (TOS) for commenting on the blog posts:
-------------------
1. Comment Spam - we have had a ton of spam from countries like Russia, Japan, China, and so on. It interferes with the discourse, and is one of the prime reasons we are moving to moderation. All one need to is look back a few months to see the blog posts I haven't had time to clean up from this type of spam to see that moderation is needed for this reason alone. In addition, if your comment is not germane to the point being discussed, it too becomes spam. It will be deleted.

2. Over time, some pretty irrational challenges and attacks have been levied against me, and that's ok if you disagree with me, just don't make it personal on me, or anyone else. Doing so means your comment won't make it out of moderation, so don't waste your time. In addition, it would be a shame for you to make a really great point that everyone would benefit from reading, and include personal attacks on me, or other commenters, because we don't edit comments, they're either in, or they're out.

3. Over at the Photo Business News Flickr forum, (here) there are almost 2,000 members and a good opportunity to get your questions answered there. If you have a suggestion for a blog topic, there's a link to make that suggestion on every page of the blog.

4. It is the policy of Photo Business News that if there is a YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, Hulu or any other video service online, we can post it here using the embedding players for those services (which often insert ads into the playback). We can't know if what might normally be considered a copyrighted work that you would think might not be allowed on, say, YouTube, in fact has been agreed to between the copyright holder and YouTube. So, if you have a question or concern, visit those sites, and flag the content you believe is problematic. In addition, we adhere to standards for quoting and citing other content, with attribution and where possible, a link to that content.

5. ANONYMOUS COMMENTS - For several years now, we've given free reign to anonymous commenters, and a small fraction of those were beneficial to the readership. It is our opinion that anonymous commenters would best be from someone who, for example, should their identity be revealed, could pose job security or economic problems for them. So to that end, unless your comment is significantly beneficial, anonymous comments won't get moderated in. If you wish to make an anonymous comment and you want to send me an e-mail identifying yourself (which I will not reveal), that would be helpful, and will increase your chances of getting your comments posted. Oh, and don't go creating a fake Blogger ID just to get in - blank Blogger ID's are just one step removed from plain anonymous postings. The more discourse where people know who each other are, the better. David Hobby, of Strobist fame summed it up best in his TOS: "Nothing looks more weenie and pathetic than sniping, critical, anonymous comments."