Dronamraju Ravi Prakash

Netflix announced recently that they expect to reach 5M subscribers in 2006, a year earlier than anticipated. In addition, they expect to have 3.85M to 4.05M subscribers by the end of this year (2005). This stock had a solid run-up in the last 2-3 months, jumping up t0 25$. I started wondering if i should exit. Market cap reached 1.34B. At a year end customer number of 3.85M, the market is paying about 350$/customer up from 250$ in dec 04 (refer this). The valuation is creeping up, but that's a reflection of the acknowledgement that netflix is indeed winning the battle.
The question to be asked though, what is a netflix customer worth to it's investor. Should we be ok with paying 500$/customer? 500$/customer and 5M customers = marketcap of 2.5B. That's a healthy 40% jump from here. On the other hand, 5M customers at 250$/customer is only 1.25B, a downside of ~8%

I have been looking down at the wi-fi stocks for the past few days. There are a lot of different kinds of players in this space. People who sell building blocks, people who pioneer new kinds of devices, people who manufacture and sell devices, and people who sell services. It would be wise to take a look at each section and identify dominant players. Since Wi-fi is still fairly early, it is unlikely that we have THE leader in the segment of "people who sell services". I am looking into other segments to see who'd be a good investment. While looking at "people who sell building blocks" two names stand out. Broadcom (BRCM) and Marvell communications (MRVL). While the background info looks a little different for each of this company, it might make sense to just buy both of them. Should I get both? Am I missing any other companies in this space that are a better value?

Chuckakung mused about wifi with me over google talk the other day. I guess after he pointed it out, this seems so obvious. Wi-Fi is going to be a norm across the nation in a matter of years. We will expect (already do) to have wifi in hotels when we travel, in convention centers, in coffe shops, possibly in movie theatres, malls etc. What companies stand to benifit from this boom? I started following on his comments and here's an interesting article from forbes. They list about 15 companies some big, some small. Most of them are usual suspects, cisco, lucent, texas instruments, netgear etc. One new name LCCI. This is a good list to start with, but, i'd have to dig in a lot more

UPDATE: ahem.. I guess that forbes article is more than a year old!! So much for the last 12 months being the year of wifi