Groupon’s Disappointing Results Prompt Call for Management Change

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Groupon Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GRPN) fourth-quarter results were so bad that there is new talk about firing CEO Andrew Mason. The problem with this is that he and two others control the company’s voting shares.

Fourth-quarter consolidated revenue totaled $638.3 million, up 30% year-over-year, but that was not as spectacular as Wall St. had hoped. The fourth-quarter GAAP loss per share of $0.12, including $0.07 loss per share from a non-operating item, compared with a loss per share of $0.12 in fourth quarter of 2011.

But the thing investors liked the least was that revenue for the first quarter 2013 is expected to be between $560 million and $610 million, an increase of between 0% and 9% compared with first quarter of 2012. Shares sold down as much as 14% on the news.

A look at Groupon’s proxy shows Mason owns 19.5% of voting shares, while Chairman Eric P. Lefkofsk owns 27.7% and Bradley A. Keywell owns 10%. Mason will not be going anywhere unless his co-founders turn against him.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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