The Elliott fund invests in Match Group
Eliott focuses on fun. The fun of meeting people, sharing time, dreaming of a future or simply living an experience. In a word, Tinder. And so Match Groupthe company behind that and other dating apps, also wins Wall Street. After Tuesday’s increase of 3.51%, the stock recorded a new increase of 0.5% yesterday, continuing the positive trend started by the Wall Street Journal’s indiscretion on a billion-dollar investment by the hedge fund Elliott Investment Management, the same one that invested in Milan in Italy and for a brief period in Tim.
The value of the stock exceeded 39 dollars, bringing the capitalization to over 10 billion dollars. In 2021, amid the Covid pandemic and the new boom in Internet stocks, Match’s value had risen above $40 billion, then the decline in subscriptions and other negative factors penalized the stock. The hedge fund wants to push the company to make changes and take initiatives to strengthen the value of the shares. Match Group is a Dallas, Texas-based company that owns and operates the largest global portfolio of online dating services, including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OurTime and other icons of virtual meetings. However, the company has to deal with repeated difficulties in maintaining subscriptions, face increasingly fierce competition and counteract the increasingly reduced interest in its apps among young people.
“Our group regularly engages with investors and will continue to work to create great experiences for our users and value for our shareholders,” a Match spokesperson explains in a statement. Also because the company outperforms its publicly traded rivals, including Bumble, valued at almost $2 billion, and Grindr, around $1.5 billion. L’app Tinder, the world‘s largest dating site by users, reported revenue of about $1.8 billion in 2022, up 9% from 2021. Revenue at Hinge, its fastest-growing platform, they increased 44% year over year. However, analysts and investors recently expressed concern that Tinder’s growth slowed more severely than expected. Match has also seen an ongoing change in top management, causing some unease among shareholders. In November, the group reported third-quarter results that showed a continued decline in the number of “payers” on the Tinder app.
The company also expects the decline to be more pronounced in the current quarter, due to price increases that Match began implementing in early 2023. The company maintains, however, that the slowdown represents a short-term blip in its broader recovery plans. In a horizon not without unknowns, therefore, Elliott’s entry could solve the “heart problems” of the king of online dating; after all, the super fund is known for having invested in technology and services companies, imposing transversal changes that include the sales sector, not least companies such as Salesforce and Pinterest.
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