After Losing Nearly Half Its Users In A Year, Investors Dock Zynga’s Valuation By $400 Million

It is not a good day to be Zynga, or one of its investors if you held stock in the firm yesterday. Following a decidedly negative earnings report, investors have unloaded the firm’s shares, sending them down around 15 percent in regular trading.

That loss comes after Zynga’s stock price rose in the wake of a very strong quarterly performance by Facebook. Investors had hoped that the strength of Facebook’s earnings indicated that Zynga, too, would have reported a good set of financial and user-based metrics.

It was perhaps a decent gambit, but it was utterly wrong. A small picture of the company’s decline: Zynga’s daily active user count for the quarter totaled 39 million. However, in the preceding sequential quarter, Zynga had 52 million daily active users. A year ago, that figure was 72 million.

Revenue, to cite another statistic, was down by more than $100 million to $231 million. Zynga is a company in steep decline.

And the market docked its allowance. Comparing yesterday’s closing price of $3.50, Zynga’s current price of $3 is a just over a 14 percent decline. In dollar terms, Zynga today shed around $400 million of market capitalization. As you will recall, this is not the first time that Zynga has suffered from this sort of gut punch to its stock price.

This is not Zynga’s lowest point. The company’s 52 week low rests at $2.01 per share, at which point Zynga was worth less than $2 billion. Zynga’s stock peaked in March 2012 at a price of $14.69. At current tip, Zynga’s stock has declined around 80 percent since its all-time high.

Whether Zynga can pull out of its current slide is an open question. Its CEO change provided a large bump in its market valuation, sending the worth of Zynga up $300 million. Quickly, those gains have been erased, and more.

Zynga reported $1.53 billion in cash and marketable securities. The market is therefore valuing Zynga, post cash, at under $1 billion. Zing? Guh.

Top Image Credit: Ben Watts