Pandora Has Lost ‘$1 Bn in 4 Years’

Pandora, the US based online music streaming service released their quarterly financials on November 3rd this year. Following the report, Pandora stock fell by over 24% with the share price dropping under $5. MBW point out that in March 2014, Pandora was worth around $8bn, around six times its current worth and that in 2011, when Pandora Media launched on the New York Stock Exchange, it began trading at $16 a share, with an overall valuation of $2.6bn.

Although the fiscal trend for Pandora has been downward for a while, their troubles were exacerbated this quarter by the loss of 1.1m listeners from Australia and New Zealand, after Pandora closed its operation in those territories at the end of July this year. Pandora’s official active data base is now at 73.7m which MBW report as the lowest since they began reporting their quarter-end active listener numbers in 2014.

The Q3 statistics also report a slowdown in advertising revenue for the company too. However, there was some positive news for Pandora investors, as the company also reported a rise in paying subscribers, with the number of Pandora Premium subscribers now surpassing a million.

Nasdaq.com reported Pandora President and CEO Roger Lynch as saying: “There is no doubt we have a lot of work to do to better meet the full spectrum of both our listeners' and advertisers' needs. But there is also no doubt that we have a great set of assets, which form a solid foundation on which to build.”