Wefox:Look to New York
Everything digital: Investors have great expectations of the insurer Lemonade. Can you develop the same enthusiasm for Wefox?
(Photo: Sebastian Gollnow / dpa)
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The Swiss-German insurance company Wefox wants to go public. The model is lemonade in the USA.
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By Herbert Fromme, Cologne
The US insurer Lemonade is still small. In the first half of 2020, he had sales of just $ 56 million (46 million euros). During the same period, he made a loss of $ 58 million. But Lemonade is growing rapidly and is fully digital – and thus igniting the imagination of investors.
On July 2, 2020, the company went public, the shares cost 29 dollars. Now they are trading for $ 151. Today the small company is worth a whopping nine billion dollars on the stock exchange. For comparison: Allianz has an annual turnover of 142 billion euros. And it’s profitable. But the insurance giant, with a market value of 80 billion euros (97 billion dollars), is only eleven times more expensive than the New York start-up.
Investors have great expectations of the future of the fully digital insurer, which is why it is soaring. Lemonade is the role model of Julian Teicke, head of the Swiss-German insurance company Wefox. Because Teicke is also playing with the idea of going public.
He hit the headlines in 2019 because prominent investors entrusted him with $ 235 million. These included the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund and Samsung. Teicke is currently back in talks with investors. He already received 100 million euros at the end of 2020, with a further 100 to 150 million euros to follow in the coming weeks. Teicke then wants to sell the 200 to 250 million euros to the public as a third financing round or C-round. Start-ups almost always go public after the C round. Perhaps Teicke will dare to take to the floor as early as 2022. If he does that, then probably only if Wefox is already valued in the billions when the shares are issued.
The company had around 100 million euros in sales in 2020, and it should be 300 million euros in 2021. Teicke is aiming for 1.4 billion euros for 2022. There may also be a first win in 2021. A new brand identity, which is planned for March 2021, should help. Teicke then wants to turn the brands Wefox (broker portal and sales), One (own insurer) and Koble (software and design for insurers) into the uniform brand Wefox.
The big question is: Can investors develop the same enthusiasm for Wefox as they do for Lemonade? It is doubtful. Because at its core, the company is a platform for smaller insurance brokers, not a digital insurer. Wefox mainly sells for other companies. The insurance subsidiary One in Liechtenstein works digitally, but cannot make up for this deficiency. Wefox is first and foremost an intermediary – and thus probably much less interesting than its role model.
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