McAfee seeks $2bn return to stock market after Intel unpleasantness
- Reference: 1601364545
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/09/29/mcafee_ipo/
- Source link:
McAfee has been there before: when Intel bought the company in 2010 it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. This time around it’s looking for a NASDAQ listing and its [1]registration statement says is part of a plan hatched back in 2017 when it was spun out after an unhappy time being owned by Intel.
The filing says McAfee plans to issue $100m of shares and dangles the following number before would-be investors:
Net revenue of $2,635 million in fiscal 2019 and $1,401 million in the 26 weeks ended June 27, 2020
Net loss was $236 million in fiscal 2019 and net income was $31 million in the 26 weeks ended June 27, 2020
Net loss margin was 9.0% in fiscal 2019 and net income margin was 2.2% in the 26 weeks ended June 27, 2020
Adjusted EBITDA was $799 million in fiscal 2019 and $507 million in the 26 weeks ended June 27, 2020
Adjusted EBITDA margin was 30.3% in fiscal 2019 and 36.2% in the 26 weeks ended June 27, 2020
Lest you balk at the prospect of buying shares in a recently-loss-making security company, the filing suggests that you won’t just be buying into a trusted name that’s proven it can grow, you’ll be buying into an industry with a $30.4 billion addressable market projected to grow at a four-year compound annual growth rate of 7.9 percent.
McAfee asserts its brand will help it grow consumer sales, while adding partnerships with managed services providers and evolving its cloud products to grow enterprise sales.
Sophos puts 100 at risk of redundancy as future of Naked Security blog hangs in balance [2]READ MORE
Filings of this sort are required to be frank so that investors know what they are getting into. McAfee’s makes the observation that it faces challenges including “… the continued decline in the sale of new personal computers, and the rise of mobility and cloud-based solutions, all of which make satisfying our customers’ diverse and evolving needs more challenging. In addition, many of our enterprise customers operate in industries characterized by rapidly changing technologies and business plans, which require them to adapt quickly to increasingly complex cybersecurity requirements.”
McAfee also worries that “large cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, may expand or commence providing native cybersecurity functionality directly on the platform such that our current and potential customers forego purchasing cybersecurity solutions from us.”
Which would rather set the cat among the pigeons given that hyperscalers’ current model makes security a customer’s problem.
Financial media report that the $100m figure in the filing is a placeholder and is likely to change once investors sniff the prospectus, with $2bn a likely target. ®
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[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1783317/000119312520256766/d89887ds1.htm
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/04/sophos_100_redundancies_naked_security/
[3] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
"buying into a trusted name"
Nearly fell off my chair laughing.
(Previous experiences dealing with them were substantially less than favourable)
Decline
From where I am sitting enterprises are ditching all of the old names in endpoint protection for MS Defender (actually a pretty evolved decent product - hard to believe I know...) and the home users would be doing the same if only they could manage to uninstall the damned Mcafee/Symantec thing which seemingly digs in deeper than a chinese hacker.
In terms of investment in McAfee now? As the dragon's say..."I'm out"
Re: Decline
Quote: "...and the home users would be doing the same if only they could manage to uninstall the damned Mcafee/Symantec thing which seemingly digs in deeper than a chinese hacker".
Quite a few years ago my parents had got themselves a basic laptop, and this came with McAfee pre-installed. Usual three months free situation.
I turned up to visit, and seems the free period was up, so my Dad had had a go uninstalling it, he'd done this before for other apps. But each re-boot, McAfee came back, seemingly some sort of auto repair process!
By the time I looked at it, it was a mess, McAfee itself wasn't running properly (errors on login), and none of the list McAfee 'apps' in Windows could be uninstalled, throwing errors each time.
Even a McAfee removal tool, and a 3rd party one, didn't work, and trying to do a fresh install of McAfee over the top, in order to then remove it afterwards, also failed with errors!
I ended up using Safe Mode and other tricks, to physically remove all McAfee components and registry entries by hand. This took at least three goes, as a reboot and McAfee would try to re-install itself again, but fail! So would put some things back that I'd removed already. Once complete I then ran check disk and a reg clean up tool (carefully!), to clean up any remaining McAfee related stragglers like dlls etc.
In hindsight, I should have just backed up my dads documents, wiped the machine and installed Windows fresh. But this was back in the days when you didn't get install media with the OEM machines, and I didn't have a copy of Windows on me. (He was an MS Office user, so Linux wasn't an option either, and this was before the days of O365).
Re: Decline
Yup, exactly that... i know the product needs some defences against uninstall, because threat actors do often uninstall endpoint protection..... but.... give me my damned machine back you bastids!
Re: Decline
There was a time when McAfee was quite good. That was about two decades ago.
Now ... McAfee slows down your machine just like a having a lead anchor towed behind your car. And worse, it couldn't find water standing waist deep in the ocean, much less malware. I actually thought Intel made their product worse; jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none. I think the only reason they make any money is because they bribe computer manufacturers to pre-load it and so clueless users pay for it because it is easier.
McAfee asserts its brand will help it grow consumer sales
Not to me. While I was doing volunteer work at a community computer centre, there was a steady stream of very upset people who had spent what little money they had on a HP laptop and found it was quite slow. I replaced its factory-installed McAfee with the free version of Avira and they went away quite happy.
How many corps are now dropping McAfee? Or are still using it?
I work for a 50,000+ US corp, although I'm based in the UK.
We've been using McAfee for decades, as AV, policy enforcement, auditing, firewall etc. i.e. a full suite.
It's always been an absolute nightmare, major resource hog, especially on a HDD, with services that really should be background tasks, seeming to run at the same priority as the user, so fight with the user for CPU resources all the time, and an auto update process that would only update so much, with Windows eventually warning you that McAfee was out of date, and requiring you to launch McAfee and hit the update button yourself!
For years I've booted up my laptop on a morning, logged in, then locked the screen and gone for a coffee, or breakfast, then come back, as the machine would basically be unusable for at least 10 mins. This was helped a little bit by SSDs replacing HDDs over time, but that's just obscuring the issues, rather than fixing them.
Didn't matter how much complaining was done, no one ever seemed to look into it.
Then suddenly late last year, a compete new Windows 10 Enterprise 1909 image was created, almost all 3rd party tools were dropped, including McAfee, Adobe etc, replaced by standard Microsoft features where available (AV, policy enforcement, Firewall etc). With the only 3rd party tools remaining being a VPN client (which is the same as we used before), and a security tool (a secure proxy for all Internet traffic when not on the corp LAN). Even the image itself was a massive improvement, the previous one being full of custom scripting, which took all day to run, the new image is just a slightly customised wrapper around the standard MS Win 10 installer/updater.
The laptop, once McAfee was gone, was noticeable faster, especially on login after a cold boot up. I can now log in, and after a few seconds start using the machine.
I say goodbye and good riddance to McAfee, I hope never to see you again.
Re: How many corps are now dropping McAfee? Or are still using it?
Same scenario here...
And that's before you actually have to try to use it from a EntSec operations point of view.
The telemetry via EPO, awful, the signatures, woeful, resource consumption, outrageous.
Conversations with McCrappy themselves? "oh we don't protect against THAT, its not a 'virus'"
I remember Mcafee from the late 80's, it was good.... these days, not at all..
Re: How many corps are now dropping McAfee? Or are still using it?
I also work for a big US corporation (200K + worldwide). We are firmly in bed with McAfee. My laptop has become unusable. The CPU load is 60-70% when idle. But our Infosec, in their infinite wisdom, keep on piling security "malware" on our PCs/Laptops. The number of different McAfee services keeps on growing but there is also Tanium and CyberArc and ...
Several days ago I had to go to the office and when passing the Help desk area I saw piles of used laptops and most of them had a sticker - "very, very slow".
Came here to say...
....things that people already said. I know nobody whos actually in IT that has a good thing to say about anything McAfee. Can only imagine they drop their pants on pricing all the time, and someone somewhat higher signs up to making their IT unusable for a 5 year contract.
Re: Came here to say...
The problem they have now is that MS are cheaper whores than even them..... a few dollars, tag it onto your MS enterprise subscription, easy. Everyone has a MS subscription now anyway - you can't buy anything MS without a subscription now.
As I said further up, MS Defender actually isn't even a bad technical choice, although when it was first suggested here we all did a "WTF!" before we tested it.
Who says you can't teach an old John new tricks? Any good hooker will tell you different
McAfee’s makes the observation that it faces challenges including “… the continued decline in the sale of new personal computers, and the rise of mobility and cloud-based solutions, all of which make satisfying our customers’ diverse and evolving needs more challenging.
How very fortunate for they in the know that know how such things grow, that both those particular declines and peculiar rises are addressed and serviced by novel software applications programs verging on the edge of being classified virtual pogroms by failed and failing systems administrations.
Indeed, such addressed industrious services may easily be characterized by rapidly changing technologies and business plans, which require them to adapt quickly to increasingly complex cybersecurity requirements too, which might, .... for there is always a negative risk to be introduced into any capitalising market to allow for alternative hedging derivative bets/laundered money churn ..... make such novel software applications programs services ultra secure and extremely reliable ..... Prime AAA Stock, with others, who may be as competition and opposition hoping it might not be so, as it would decimate and/or destroy their own planned future projects.
Who out there has positive views of the McAfee brand??
When I think of McAfee, I either remember the omnipresent crapware of the early 00s, or John McAfee waving a gun around and absconding from Latin America with a murder charge.