Growth Enquiry Investor Invest $100 mln in Avast Software

http://www.avast.com/pr-growth-equity-investor-summit-partners-invests-100-million-in-avast-software

Congratulations !!

 

Boatload of money, congrats!

 

No offence, but i wouldn't have thought Avast was worth anywhere near that to start with. And GEI only get a minority stake for ALL that $ Doesn't seem to make sense

If it's true, i'm amazed, but good for them

Only 3k ? What about ALL the others

 

Pure speculation on my part, but I would not be surprised to see AVAST become a public company in the not too distant future. Thus, the motivation for the investment by Summit Partners might be just to get ahead of the IPO?

 

I suspect that this assertion is based on the OPSWAT Windows Antivirus Worldwide Market Share Analysis (June, 2010) -- an analysis that is significantly flawed, in my opinion. If so, then it is disappointing to have a reputable company like AVAST quote such a questionable “market share” analysis.

 

No. It's based on the IDC estimate of 500-700M consumer PCs in the world, and avast's 110M+ active users...

 

So the 1-5 has alot of play in it then honesty. It could go 1-7+ depending

 

That was my first thought, but if McAfee is worth $8 billion, or whatever Intel paid for them, then Avast has to be worth something decent.

 

I thought Norton/Trend Micro and McAfee comprised about 65% of the av market, with Norton having most of that. I see stats that avira free and avg free have 100 million+ each, which puts the total of the three freebies at 300 million+ (of the 500-700 million). Considering MSE has a decent slice of the pie now plus whatever the Kasperskies and BitDefenders of the world are nailing down....there are just some stats that don't add up.

BTW- Avast is my favorite av, so this is no slam against them.

 

Glad to know, congrats.

 

They add up perfectly. Norton/McAfee/Trend own 65% of the market revenue-wise, but definitely not in terms of the actual number of users. These three vendors combined have less than 100M consumer users - i.e. less than avast alone, less than AVG alone, and possibly less then Avira alone (if you trust their numbers).

Thanks
Vlk

 

According to Linkedin Avast Software had a revenue of $1 for 2009

 

Your also basing your numbers strait off of how many people have signed up right ? and not actual people that have the software installed.

In other words someone comes and signs up for the "free" version but never installs it or removes it you still count them because they a valid key for x amount of days correct ? Also means you have to sign up for a new key for every computer you have these numbers can climb very very quickly. Please do correct me if I'm wrong.

 

Yes, you're wrong
The numbers are based on the statistics from update servers (though the difference to the number of registrations isn't very big).

If you have multiple computers, you get counted multiple times that way - so yes, it might better be called PCs than users.

 

In that case then. The numbers are all out of whack... As people with 3 user lic of another brand would be counted as 1 user.

 

Well, first I'd ask - how do you know? (how exactly it's counted for other products)
Second, how many users really use more than one computer? Is it significant in the huge userbase? (Note: the majority of the users are users of the free versions - i.e. there's no "3 user lic").

I'm not saying I know the answers, just that you cannot expect these numbers to be exact; the number are huge, one million is rather insignificant. Besides - new users are coming, old users are leaving/switching... the whole thing is rather dynamic in time.

 

Thanks for the clarification. However, please note that the statement by AVAST simply says “one out of every five computers around the world” -- i.e., the assertion is not limited to consumer PCs. In this way, the AVAST statement may be misleading by neglecting the corporate market.

With respect to the issue of investing in AVAST, the count of “active users” is less compelling than the count of “paid users.” How many AVAST users actually purchase their antivirus product?

 

I'm going off the same way that Avast does it.. 1 key to every user most products that do 3 user lic do 1 key per go around and could be counted as 1 user.

As for how many people have more then one computer. I don't know that answer I'm sure the answer would surprise us both. As in my house I currently own 7 computers all actively running with a 8th laptop on it's way.

What would shock me more is if the Corporate numbers from other company's were included in this bunch such as Norton, Mcafee, Eset among others.

 

FYI -- Symantec alone reports gathering “malicious code intelligence from more than 133 million client, server, and gateway systems that have deployed its antivirus products.”

 

I don't remember where but I read sometime the amount of paid users is in the single digits.
So that means out of that 110 million atleast 91% is the using the Free version. And Pro + Internet Security together in the most positive case 9%.

 

Dear vlk , with all my respect to you and your company , you aren't serious . You can't be serious.

Where are all those Avast users ? We all know and have seen in the past which companies are number 1 in usage . I'll give you an example - how many people in the USA have heard of Avast and how many have heard of McAfee ? How many use avast and how many McAfee ?

What about China ? How many have heard of Avast ?

How many paid clients do you have ? What is the percent Paid vs. Free users ?

 

That implies that AVAST has about 9.9 million paying customers, at most; which in turn implies that the company’s annual revenue is about $495 million -- unless the company has some way to monetize the value of its non-paying customers, for example, through advertisements or through renting its user list to other companies for marketing promotions.

So, what is the business model of AVAST with respect to its non-paying users?

Thank you.

 

I have to agree with you on this one. It was wrongly worded. What was really meant was "consumer PCs".

I think that the statement is still +- correct as the IDC report is also talking about the number of consumer PCs, not "users" (users are quite difficult to measure, while PC/OS shipments aren't that difficult).

Correct, it's currently in single digits, actually "low single digits". As you can imagine, it very much varies country-by-country. The English speaking countries are generally the most profitable (again, no surprises here).

I'm absolutely serious.

There are analysts (Forrester, IDC, Gartner, Cowen, Citi, Goldman etc) that make researches exactly like this. And their data generally confirm what I'm saying (sorry I can't really quote any of these reports as that would breach their copyright conditions).

China is somewhat difficult... we currently have about 3.1M users in China (pretty much all of them using the free version), which isn't too much (given the size of the country) but you have to start somewhere...

As I said, the conversion rates world-wide are in low single digits (i.e. not 9%) so the revenue of the company is substantially smaller than your figure... but definitely not complaining...

Besides the modest income generated by the distribution of Google Chrome, there's not much else, really. That is, the paying customers somewhat sponsor the free users, in a way.


Thanks
vlk

 

So 1 of each 5 "consumer PC's" in world is using Avast... what are you waiting for the cloud!

 

Question- how much did the new GUI of Avast 5 contribute to new users switching to Avast? I remember the older versions of Avast were not that appealing to some people because of the GUI issues. I'm wondering if the "eye candy" effect has ever been able to be quantified in data.