Is The Ancestry.com IPO For You? (ACOM)

This week came a filing for online family tree site Ancestry.com.  The company plans to come public in an initial public offering and no formal financial terms were disclosed.  While most internet companies have free and subscriptions revenues, this is a subscription-based online community for researching family history.  This one has applied with NASDAQ to trade under the stock ticker of “ACOM.”

The filing is for up to $75 million in common stock in the IPO.  Ancestry.com is a Provo, Utah-based company.  The trailing 6-months show roughly $99.903 million in revenues and $8.183 million in net income for holders after taxes.  The company’s revenues have increased from $122.6 million in 2004 to $197.6 million in 2008, a compound annual growth rate of 12.7%.

Morgan Stanley and BofA Merrill Lynch are the lead underwriters; co-managers are listed as Jefferies, Piper Jaffray, and BMO Capital Markets.

Believe it or not, this company has almost 1 million paying subscribers globally as of June 30, and its registered users have created over 11 million family trees containing more than 1.1 billion profiles.  The company is beginning to deploy tools and technologies to facilitate social networking and crowd sourcing to provide subscribers with an expanding family history collaboration network.

Unfortunately without terms and without fully diluted shares, this one is fairly hard to evaluate for growth and value per share.  If you wish to do further research on your own, here is that full SEC filing.

JON C. OGG
AUGUST 5, 2009