raymondh wrote: ↑15 Aug 2019
Undistraction wrote: ↑15 Aug 2019
He's been handed a failing company with a rapidly shrinking user base,
I thought Props was a private company. If you have financials or user base data that would be very interesting!
You can get Swedish financials any time you like. They're a bit out date because they're always a year behind, which is a bit frustrating, so we only have up to 2017.
https://translate.google.co.uk/translat ... %2Fbokslut
"Failing company" as Unidistraction puts it I'd say is a bit of a stretch. I see no evidence of that.
Stagnating , on the other hand, is pretty clear: there's a solid profit but absolutely zero growth.
So here's something that isn't speculation because it's right there in the figures: tellingly, the number of employees was down by a third between 2015 and 2017 (from 44 down to 28), yet with income pretty much the same (Reason 8 was 2014, so one can possibly explain the 2016 bump (R9 release) over 2015 (no new release), so a lot of that increased profit over the period is in reality savings through reduced wages.
Crucial there is that 2017 was
both a major Reason update (9.5 with frickin' VST)
and an upgrade year (R10), yet PH made slightly
less in revenue than in 2016. So it's fair to suggest* less people upgraded to Reason 10 in 2017 than upgraded to Reason 9 in 2016. At the time I think I even said it was strange they released upgrades in consecutive years; a lot of people don't upgrade every year. I still don't know why they didn't keep R10 back until Spring 2018 (the Reason 10.1 featureset perhaps?).
It's interesting that last time such speculation came up (when only the 2016 figures were available), Ernst himself piped up with "most of this speculation is wrong". I really don't know why he did that because the problem with making that statement is that he thus confirmed some—or even much—of the speculation was actually
correct. After all, "most" is as little as 51%. So another way of writing "most of the speculation is wrong" is "some of this speculation is right".
If the speculation were wrong he would have just written "The speculation is wrong".
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*We don't have granular breakdown for, e.g. RE revenue, subs revenue, the countless millions in ReCycle sales alone etc. I've estimated in the past that the biggest stream is Reason upgrades, at least in a Reason upgrade year, with up to around $2m in their % from third party REs. Their own REs at 100% revenue is probably $1-2m. The regularity that full Reason licenses get slashed (or discount-converted from the free Lite advertising licenses) I can't believe they're selling many full-price licences these days (although in the interest of balance, is anyone? It might be no-one is). I'd be curious to know if the income includes RE party sales; it says "Net sales", so presumably they shouldn't, otherwise it'd be gross sales, yes/no?