Forbes Sees Pandora Growing To 120 Million Users In The Next Five To Six Years

Heading To 120 Million Users? 140 Million?

In an article in FORBES, the financial magazine projects, "PANDORA’s total active user count to increase from 76.2 million in 2013 to over 120 million in the next five-six years. However, if the figure increases to 140 million instead driven by success in the new car space and strong adoption in international markets, there can be about 10% upside to our price estimate. On the flip side, if the figure increases to only 100 million due to fierce competition and slow international expansion, there can be about 10% downside to our price estimate for PANDORA MEDIA."

While that projection is good news for the webcaster, FORBES also points out that PANDORA's, "total active user count soared from 29.3 million in 2010 to 76.2 million in 2013. However, growth in this metric has been relatively slow this year. During the first six months of 2014, PANDORA added just 200,000 active users, which is an insignificant figure considering the radio provider’s historic growth standards."

What's slowing PANDORA's growth? FORBES points to, "growing competition from SIRIUSXM and emergence of free music streaming services such as SPOTIFY, GOOGLE‘s SONGZA and APPLE‘s BEATS, PANDORA is unlikely to repeat its historic performance. Yet, with growing smartphone adoption, international expansion and aggressive push in cars, the company should be able to maintain an acceptable growth rate in the long term."

Moving forward, FORBES sees the keys to PANDORA's growth will be:

• Growing Smartphone Market
• Push into Cars
• International Expansion

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