Yahoo! bought Kelkoo back in 2004 for Euro 475. News out late yesterday that they have sold it for Euro 100 million to Jamplant - a UK investment firm I have not heard of. This a significant loss for Yahoo! both in terms of capital losses but also in functionality. On the positive side for Yahoo because after three good years in 2007 the business lost Euro12 million. I can see the short term benefit but in the long term I think Yahoo will regret exiting meta-search. French language news story here including a table showing the turnover and losses. TechCrunch story here including English language version of the internal email.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Yahoo sells Kelkoo for Euro 100mm to Jamplant (UK investment firm)
Yahoo! bought Kelkoo back in 2004 for Euro 475. News out late yesterday that they have sold it for Euro 100 million to Jamplant - a UK investment firm I have not heard of. This a significant loss for Yahoo! both in terms of capital losses but also in functionality. On the positive side for Yahoo because after three good years in 2007 the business lost Euro12 million. I can see the short term benefit but in the long term I think Yahoo will regret exiting meta-search. French language news story here including a table showing the turnover and losses. TechCrunch story here including English language version of the internal email.
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5 comments:
I wonder if this new business of buying a growing, happy and successful enterprise, actively ignoring it for 4 years and then selling it off at a much lower value will take off? It's got legs...
Can we make any analogy with the online travel sector where the technology travel companies were going after the OTAs until 2005. Have they all made the good acquisitions at the right price at the right time? What have they done with them until n ow?
Yeah I like the first comment.
It’s funny because Kelkoo was quite an innovator doing travel meta-search even back in 2001/2. Just after the acquisitions if Yahoo had built a new brand around just the travel meta-search component of Kelkoo, who knows they might have had a Kayak on their hands.
I assume there were not many entrepreneurial type travel execs involved at the time.
i used kelkoo a lot but now this is a joke...i prefer using new tool such as twenga http://www.twenga.co.uk
what do you think about it ?
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