Patrick Grove's Empire.

Kudos to Patrick Grove again. He is truly a strong deal maker. For readers who do not know Patrick's background. I will cover the iBuy and Dealguru thoughts in another post. But first...

Patrick was from the first dot com boom and started this general portal called Catcha which was meant to be like Yahoo for SEA. They raised money and were all geared up for IPO. But market crashed in April 2000 and they missed the window. What happened next is quite a tough period as Patrick and partners bought out their investors and pivoted the business into an English magazine publisher based in KL. They grew that until some in 2007 or 2008 when he went back into the dot com area with his purchase of iProperty in malaysia and at the same time pushing the malaysian Catcha Media into becoming a reseller for MSN and other digital media properties.

What happened next is what i admire him for.

He somehow managed to string together a bunch of in principle aquisitions and concurrently IPO on ASX the iproperty group. Between 2008 to 2013, the company used Other Peoples Money from IPO, European investors and rights issues to expand regionally with mixed results. iProperty is super successful in Malaysia but has lost out to Propertyguru in SG. Current market valuation is A$355M or about S$400M. iProperty sales is at A$15M last 12 mths with a loss of 1.5M or so. Mostly winning in MY market.

He is a significant shareholder via Catcha Group which owns about 23% of iProperty. He is majority shareholder of Catcha group. So what he did is to structure the initial deal, build up a team of good executives from REA group (top Australian portal) and then get the business to work in this region. 1.5M loss is not a big deal if iProperty can continue to grow and scale. And their losses are reducing. So to outside investors, he has proven his ability to deliver to shareholders so far.

Also to note, this market valuation i am sure has helped Propertyguru get the price they wanted for their deal.  So it is not always a bad thing that your competitors get good deals!

The next thing he did was to list the malaysia Catcha Media at a RM100M valuation. Much lower valuation since the market is KL and also magazine publishing is less sexy. In testament to his deal power, he has recently merged it with Says.com and has gotten the Says guys to try to grow this business well in MY. But i think the lesson is that KL investors value  dot coms a lot less than in Australia. I believe investors right now are still valuing Catcha Media below IPO price.

The next deal he did was last year when he entered the car market but IPO yet another low revenue and profitless firm on ASX leveraging on his success with iProperty. iCarAsia is currently doing what iproperty did 5-6 years ago and trying to build up car portals in SEA. Market cap of A$71M on barely annualized 1.5M revenue!!!! 

Whether iCarAsia can become another iProperty really depends on execution next few years. Will be interesting to watch.

So what he has effectively done is to seed fund privately and do his series A, B,C via the stock market. The ability to IPO at Series A/B round is where his magic is.

Most recently, he created a new company to enter ecommerce space via acquiring key deal sites in 3 countries. Will talk about iBuy in another post.