Business valuation-Myths and facts.

The Edutech company, Byju’s, has been valued at $5 billion, much higher from the previous $3.6 billion, when it raised $540 million in a funding round led by South African conglomerate Naspers. Flipkart was valued at $21 billion in 2015 when the Walmart had acquired 77% of its stake. While Toyota recently invested about $500 million in the ride hailing company, Uber, at a valuation of $76 billion, bankers have indicated that the said company could be valued at as much as $ 120 billion. All the figures are dream high which can make any investor drooled over, easily.

Whereas despite of this eye-popping valuations, all the above companies are at operational losses and it may take years to reverse the situation. Think & Learn, which runs online learning platform Byju’s, doubled its revenue to Rs 500.2 crore in 2017-18 from the previous financial year while its losses fell around 40% to Rs 37.1 crore during the period, according to the company’s consolidated financial statement. Similarly, E-commerce major Flipkart has trimmed its consolidated losses to Rs 11.606 billion for the financial year ended March 2018, as per regulatory documents. The company had registered a total loss of Rs 16.402 billion in the previous fiscal, according to the documents filed with the Corporate Affairs. Ahead of its initial public offering, Uber reported a net loss of $865 million in the fourth quarter. Meanwhile, Uber's adjusted EBIDTA losses came in at $842 million, an increase of 88 percent year over year, and an increase of 60 percent from the third quarter.

There is something atypical with the above statements. The valuation of these companies are sky-rocketing so as the losses. After reading the above passages, which are very incongruous to each other, a natural question will come to the mind of a common man, often perplexed and astonished, on the authenticity of the said valuations. Are these valuations bogus?

Value and price

Everything has a value and a price. Though we use the said terms interchangeably, both are quite different. Value is on the beholders eyes. It will differ from person to person even for same goods or article. A Morris Minor car may have only scrap value in the eyes of a scrap dealer but the