Deezer, a French music-streaming service, hopes to raise more than $300 million in an initial public offering in Paris this month, according to Bloomberg. The service is attempting to raise cash to compete in an increasingly competitive space against much larger companies like Spotify, Pandora (P) and Apple Music (AAPL).
The company plans to sell 8.2 million shares, valued as much as 49.24 euros each. After the IPO, Deezer could be valued at as much as 1.1 billion euros. So far, Deezer has not been profitable. In the first half of 2015, it lost 9 million euros, according to the Wall Street Journal. But Deezer doesn’t seem to be concerned. “We can really see that streaming is picking up,” CEO Hans-Holger Albrecht said to the Financial Times. “This is just the beginning of the curve.”
Deezer says it has more than 6 million subscribers, but only about 3 million of them were active monthly users as of June. Plus, according to the Financial Times, only about 3.6 million of the subscribers actually generated revenue for the company. Spotify, in contrast, has about 75 million users, 20 million of them paying.
