Valuing Global Fashion Group

Yesterday, in Mint, I wrote about ratchets in option valuation (a pet topic of mine), and gave alternate valuations of different Indian “unicorns” by accounting for the downside protection clauses that come with startup investment.

Money quote:

This implies that a share of the company held by [investors] includes a long put option, while a share of the company held by earlier investors includes a short put option (since they have implicitly written this option). In other words, a share held by the new investors is worth much more than a share held by earlier investors.

Now comes news that Global Fashion Group (that includes Jabong and a few other fashion houses started by Rocket Internet) has raised money at a “down round”. This gives me a good opportunity to put my theory to practice.

GFG has now raised $339M for a headline valuation of $1.13 billion. In its earlier round, it had raised $169M for a headline valuation of $3.5 billion. Let us look at a hypothetical employee of GFG who owned 0.1% of the company before the previous round of investment, and see what these shares are worth now.

Absence of ratchets

GFG had a “pre-money” valuation of $3.33 billion, and 0.1% of that would have been worth $3.33 million. As of that round of investment, existing investors had 95% stake in the company, so our friend’s share of the company would have come down to 0.095% (95% of 0.1%).

The new round shows a pre-money valuation of $791 million, and so our friend’s stock would be worth $750,000 after the latest round of valuation. This is a comedown from the previous valuation, but is still significant enough.

Presence of ratchets

Let’s assume that the previous round of investment into GFG came with a full ratchet (we’ll look at other downside protection instruments later). This would mean that its investors in that round would have to be compensated for the drop in valuation.

Investors in the previous round put in $169M for a headline valuation of $3.33Bn. The condition of the full ratchet is that is that if this round’s pre-money valuation were to be less than last round’s post-money valuation, the monetary value of last round’s investors has to be the same.

So despite this round showing a pre-money valuation of only $791M, last round’s investors would claim that $169M of that belongs to them (the way this is achieved in an accounting context is that the ratio in which their preferred shares convert to common shares changes). So the earlier investors (who came before last round) see the value of their shares go down to a paltry $622M. From owning 95% of the company, the down-round means they only own 79% now. And that is before the new round has come in.

Investors in the new round have put in $339M for a headline valuation of $1.13Bn, giving them a round 30% stake. Earlier investors have a 70% stake, of which investors who came before the previous round (which includes employees like our friend) have a 79% stake, giving them a net stake of 55%.

Coming back to our friend, remember that he owned 0.1% of the shares before the last round of investment. The ratchet means that he owns 0.1% of 55% of the company’s current headline valuation. This values his shares at $622,000.

But not so fast – since this assumes that the latest round of investment has no ratchets. If we need to take into consideration that this round has a full ratchet as well, the option formula I used in the Mint piece says that GFG is now worth $760M, far lower than the $1.13Bn headline valuation.

This implies that the stock held by investors prior to this round is now worth only $421M ($760M – $339M). Investors prior to the last round held 79% of these shares, so their stake is worth $331M now. Our friend held 0.1% of that, so his stake is only worth $331,000.

In other words, if both the previous and current rounds of investment in GFG came with a full ratchet protection, the shares held by ordinary investors such as our friend would have lost 56% of its value on account of optionality alone! Notwithstanding the fact that the remaining shares are held in a company whose value is on the downswing!

Then again, downside protection for investors could have come by other means, which were less harsh than full ratchet. Nevertheless, this can help illustrate how much of founders’ and employees’ shareholder value can be destroyed using ratchets!

One thought on “Valuing Global Fashion Group”

  1. What implied volatility are you using for option pricing? And what tenor of the option?

    Also you could just put ratchet protection as pure debt in a down round?

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