Summary Edgar Online (EDGR) is a small cap technology company that processes public filings from the SEC's EDGAR database and makes them available in various formats to investors. The company has never had a profitable year in its 14 year history ((founded 1995, public in 1999). Nevertheless, it trades at an eye-popping 9x book and 40x EBITDA. Hope springs eternal, but I believe EDGR is overvalued.
The bull story
EDGR’s nosebleed valuation is largely credited to the company’s leadership in an emerging technology called XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). XBRL is a markup language that promises to transform SEC filings from documents to standardized data that can be processed more efficiently by computer programs. Spreadsheets can automatically pull in every number from the filing and “understand” what it means. Your integrated 3-statement spreadsheet model will automatically download and plug in numbers from the latest quarter. It will work not just for the income statement or the balance sheet, but for every number in every footnote. That means you can get an automatic comparison of the company’s backlog or number of customers (for instance) quarter over quarter, or year over year. You can do it for one company or the whole industry, all before reading the first line from the 10K. The potential applications are almost limitless.
To make XBRL work, someone is going to have to mark up all those 10Ks, i.e. pull out the numbers and classify them in a standard way. This seems like a lot of work. Why would any company want to make this investment? Because it’s been mandated by the SEC. The 500 largest US companies were covered by the mandate in 2009. 1,800 companies are covered in 2010 and all 10,300 reporting entities in 2011.
And that’s just Qs and Ks in the U.S. If you count filings for debt and mutual funds, and then count filings outside the U.S. you can get some truly large numbers. EDGR’s latest investor presentation puts the addressable market at about $2B (although that estimate tellingly omits the year in which they believe the market will get to that size). On top of that, there’s the market for translating, data-basing and reselling old filings in XBRL format - there’s another $5B, according to the company.
EDGR’s first XBRL product debuted in 2005 and it currently has 36% of the market for XBRL-based SEC filings (Q3’09 thru 8/3), including high-profile clients like Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Intel (INTC). If EDGR can maintain its share as the market grows, we would be looking at a $1B company. Much better than the $19m in revenue from the past 12 months.
EDGR’s business
Let’s step back from the hype: EDGR makes money three different ways:
1. It sells Subscriptions to web-based tools that allow users to analyze SEC filings.
2. It sells Data, i.e. SEC filings (raw, parsed and formatted) directly to the user’s systems.
3. It helps US companies prepare XBRL filings for the SEC, as described above.
XBRL is the smallest segment at 28% of 2009 Q3 revenue. It’s growing fast but Subscriptions are shrinking almost as fast, so total revenue is growing slowly:
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2008 Q3
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2009 Q3
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Subscriptions
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2,127
|
1,585
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Data and solutions
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2,110
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2,179
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XBRL filings
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464
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1,478
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Total revenue
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4,701
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5,242
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