Corel Corporation has filed for an IPO and there is some interesting shareware information in its prospectus. Corel has recently purchased two famous shareware companies - Winzip Computing, developers of the famous WinZip, and Jasc Software, developer of Paint Shop Pro. Both of these applications are among shareware's greatest stars over the last decade or so.
How much money did WinZip and Paint Shop Pro make?
Since Corel wants to be a public company, it now has to report the revenues!
Revenues of WinZip Computing (WinZip)
2003 - $25,259,000
2004 - $24,928,000
2005 - $22,700,000
Revenues of Jasc Software (includes Paint Shop Pro and Photo Album)
2002 - $27,293,000
2003 - $32,841,000
2004 - $35,300,000
2005 - $40,900,000
Note that the revenues for WinZip are for a shareware product with no time out - just a nag screen.
The entire prospectus is here.
I'm still reading though it, it's fascinating stuff.
Interesting how WinZip's profits were going down at time of aquisition, perhaps a result of built in zip functionality in WinXP? Do you see where it tells how much they paid for WinZip? I see many references to a large chunk of stock WinZip was issued. If the transaction was all stock WinZip may make even more from this corel ipo.
Posted by: Phil | April 05, 2006 at 11:07 AM
Probably the integrated zip and the release of a million WinZip clones. It seems more and more ZIP softwares are on the market every year. Most are every bit as good as WinZip but cost less. I use BitZipper, personally.
Posted by: Mitchell | April 05, 2006 at 11:33 AM
You see revenue dipping? I see solid 7-digit income in an arena that has hundreds if not thousands of competitors.
Damn. I'm seriously underachieving in my revenue...
-David
Posted by: David Michael | April 05, 2006 at 05:26 PM
quite impressive and encouraging that winzip made what it did. inspite of the free zip programs, many f500 corporations rely on winzip.
Posted by: yoda | April 06, 2006 at 12:03 PM
Don't know for Jasc, but for Winzip, I see a bunch of hogwash figures - and 3/4 or more of those were probably license sales (income recorded over a few years) to the likes of Microsoft who felt their OS-es need to have ZIP capability built-in... And preferred to shield themselves by licensing from the original vendor with a bulletproof contract, instead of redeveloping from scratch and facing potential litigation.
Yes, the litigation would be stupid and unfounded, but hey, give me a reason to sue IBM, MS, Sun or Oracle any day, however stupid it looks like at first glance!
Posted by: Kamen | April 06, 2006 at 01:42 PM
Excuse me while I pick my jaw off the floor!
I'm shocked yet if you think about the amount of people who use it, its believable. It would be cool to know what % of windows users have it on their systems.
Posted by: Salman | April 06, 2006 at 06:43 PM
TO KAMEN
As far as I know, Microsoft did not license WinZip to be included in WindXP, instead they used another company who created an ActiveX/DLL for ZIP compression.
Posted by: Paul | April 07, 2006 at 05:48 AM
Unfortunately those numbers don't reflect the difference between sales to individuals and bulk sales to corporations and government. Despite of how WinZip was originally marketed, (that is, with no timeout) I would guess that those big sales make up most of their revenue. Windows XP zip functions are not as featureful or easy to use, and most competing standalone products don't have the name recognition to get the big sales.
Posted by: Anatoly Ivasyuk | April 07, 2006 at 09:42 AM