“Wireless speaker company Sonos Inc filed for an initial public offering on Friday, riding on the back of increasing popularity of streaming music though smartphone apps on connected audio systems,” Nikhil Subba reports for Reuters.
“Sonos’ hi-tech speakers and the company’s tie-ups with around 100 music streaming providers including Apple Music, Pandora, Spotify and TuneIn have helped attract audiophiles around the world,” Subba reports. “Backed by KKR Stream Holdings LLC, Sonos has grown to become a big player in the competitive home audio market, battling established players such as Bang & Olufsen, Bose and Sony as well as iPhone maker Apple… Sonos, founded in 2002, recently introduced voice-controlled speakers integrated with Amazon’s Alexa technology, putting them in direct competition with Apple’s HomePod speakers, which are powered by Siri.”
“The filing did not reveal how many shares Sonos planned to sell or their expected price. The company set a placeholder amount of $100 million to indicate the size of the IPO,” Subba reports. “It is targeting a valuation of about $2.5 billion to $3 billion according to some reports.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Good luck, Sonos.
Competing with Apple in the high end smart speaker market (they only market in which Apple competes currently) is going to be a tall order. No smart speaker will ever work as well for Apple product users as Apple’s own smart speaker(s). And that’s not even taking Apple’s massive monetary and retail advantages into account.
According to new data from Slice Intelligence, Apple’s launch outperformed its competitors on the first day of release, selling 9x more units than the Sonos One and outselling the Google Home Max by a factor of 11. – MacDailyNews, February 2, 2018
SEE ALSO:
Sound quality shootout: Apple HomePod vs. two Sonos Ones – March 16, 2018
Apple’s HomePod vs. Sonos One with Alexa – March 1, 2018
WSJ reviews Apple’s HomePod: Sounds far better than the popular smart speakers from Amazon, Google, and Sonos – February 6, 2018
How will Sonos compete against Apple’s HomePod? – February 2, 2018
Dead man walking…
I say this with love and sadness. I own over $2,000 in Sonos gear but they have failed to innovate and listen to their customers. They missed their chance and I don’t think they’ll be able to catch up now that Apple, Google, and even Amazon have their eye on the home entertainment market.
I share the same love and sadness at about the same price level as well.
I also agree that there were many missed opportunities as a result of not better listening to their customers. But a lot of it has to do with not being able to leverage from anything else in their isolated ecosystem.
Apple was able to take their existing chips, OS, media, Siri, etc… and build a great sounding speaker around it… albeit it shockingly late to the party.
Likewise Amazon was able to bring a huge number of existing customers over with price points at every level and leverage off of existing tech, products and services.
I don’t see them catching up as much as I see hope in them offering a services agnostic platform if they can continue to work with and integrate with Apple, Google, Amazon and others.
that Apple crunched soon after their IPO filing? Perhaps the dirge music needs to be queued.
Sono’s strength isn’t in its head to head comparison with Apple speakers….but in its ability to tie all the various streaming services into a single point of contact. It does that exceedingly well and better than anything Apple likely would ever deliver on their own.
But why go public? I don’t see the upside for investors on that stock.
Lest we forget there is a huge non-Apple world out there. Sonos supports all of the major music services. They also support theater systems. Apple will never directly support any music or movie services they don’t own. Sonos will do well as they always have. If they do fall back a bit someone will buy them.
I have both the Sonos Play 3 and the Play 5 at home. Just addressing the quality issue, the Play 3 is a good speaker, offering good-quality sound, but nothing special. The Play 5 is exceptional, offering perfect, near 3 dimensional sound. My wife and I were surprised to hear just how superb the sound quality is. Upon hearing it, our reaction was, “What took us to long to buy this?”
What does this have to do with Sonos as a stock? Probably not much, but I just thought I’d throw in my two cents.