Buyer : SPH
Seller : 3 main founders, 2 smaller co-founders, 40% investor JDB.
Terms : $60M cap.
My guess?
1) 2 year earnout ala Hardwarezone and shareinvestor. But with JDB a savvy player, most likely the earnout is a proportionate one rather than a cliff.
2) 60%, 25%, 15% payout.
Analysis?
Deal makes a lot of sense for SPH. It costs a lot to set up and market a new portal and there is no guarantee they will win. See their efforts over the last 10 years on property, jobs and cars. So this way, at least the executives at SPH are sure to win for the next 3 years in the car space.
Deal makes sense for founders. A valuation of 11 times sales or 25 times PE is very good and fair. Also, the shareholding does not fully incentivize the working founders as JDB took a big chunk in the early days for a low investment of $800K.
Pitfall? Can SPH integrate and run sgcarmart well together with the all-important founding team? That is the multi-million dollar question. We will wait and see.
Payout?
Based on shareholding, gig winner JDB gets 24M pax, each key founder about 9.5M max. The 2 smaller ones less. This assumes max payout of course. Good deal all round.
======================================================================
update after getting hold of their P&L for FY 2012 and combining with SPH reports.
As expected, the deal was a fair one both ways. I was wrong on payout ratios though.
1) SPH paid 53M already. (see their latest annual report).
2) SGCM profit is 3M net on revenue about 8M give or take. So the 60M valuation is about 20 times historical PE, SPH did not overpay.
Still great deal all round but the valuation is far more reasonable and not a crazy one. So looks like the Hungrygowhere guys still the best deal in terms of valuation multiple.
Thoughts on startup scene in South East Asia. While effort is made to be accurate in terms of numbers, i may sometimes get the data wrong. My purpose is to share what i know and what i have learned over the past 23 years. Feel free to leave comments or to email me. And if you are keen to learn more about Angel Investing pls visit https://www.angelcentral.co/investors/membership
Showing posts with label sgcarmart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sgcarmart. Show all posts
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Online Classifieds Heating up back now. Now all acquired!
Enough said. This is my industry so my comments back in 2007 almost all came through. I just feel short of mentioning that many acquisitions and investments will happen for the winners.
To update :
Real estate - Great guys at Propertyguru are SG #1. in MY it is iprop. Valuations in excess of 100M even though no total exits yet.
Jobs space - Only jobstreet left still independent. JobsCentral and JobsDB all acquired in 2010/2011. Jobs classifieds revenue probably 40-50M this year in SG alone.
Cars - Sgcarmart acquired by SPH in 2013 Buy/Sell - Mocca died due to execution issues, Ebay going strong. New ecommerce wave has commenced!
======================================================================= (Article first posted Aug 2007)
There has been a lot written on new internet businesses based on concepts like social networking, aggregation, mash ups etc. Singapore too has seen its fair share of such businesses but I think I am right to say that they are still very nascent and I do not know of any local ones with meaningful revenues. Except maybe xiaxue which is an excellent spunky site!
However, I do see a large battle coming up in the online classifieds space. See the number of online classifieds mass media ads running – ST701, Mocca, JobsDB, Jobstreet, JobsCentral, Monster etc. I predict much more to come. I have always felt this space warrants attention but so far few players have come in to do it. Online classifieds can be very profitable even in a small city like Singapore. I estimate the whole cars, jobs, real estate, buy/sell market is worth at least S$40M this year in online classifieds alone and it is poised to grow dramatically once someones figures out how to handle more than 1 vertical at a time.
Who are the players?
Real Estate – No clear player yet. So this space is wide open for someone to come in and make good$$. Jobs – 5 main players. Combined at about 15M revenue by my estimate. (monster, jobscentral, jobsdb, jobstreet, 701)
Cars – sgcarmart, onemotoring Buy/sell – Mocca, Yahoo!, EBay Personals – Fridae, Trevvy (all Gay sites though)… where is the local large personals for straight population? I think in the next 3 years, you will see lots more ads, lots more competition and the winner will start to emerge.
Ultimately, I feel newspaper classifieds should shrink as more people see the benefits of online classifieds with its unlimited space, search engines and transactional capability. So to all the readers who are keen on internet businesses, i think online classifieds will grow at about 30% per year min. With margins of 20+%, to me it is a very attractive business.
To update :
Real estate - Great guys at Propertyguru are SG #1. in MY it is iprop. Valuations in excess of 100M even though no total exits yet.
Jobs space - Only jobstreet left still independent. JobsCentral and JobsDB all acquired in 2010/2011. Jobs classifieds revenue probably 40-50M this year in SG alone.
Cars - Sgcarmart acquired by SPH in 2013 Buy/Sell - Mocca died due to execution issues, Ebay going strong. New ecommerce wave has commenced!
======================================================================= (Article first posted Aug 2007)
There has been a lot written on new internet businesses based on concepts like social networking, aggregation, mash ups etc. Singapore too has seen its fair share of such businesses but I think I am right to say that they are still very nascent and I do not know of any local ones with meaningful revenues. Except maybe xiaxue which is an excellent spunky site!
However, I do see a large battle coming up in the online classifieds space. See the number of online classifieds mass media ads running – ST701, Mocca, JobsDB, Jobstreet, JobsCentral, Monster etc. I predict much more to come. I have always felt this space warrants attention but so far few players have come in to do it. Online classifieds can be very profitable even in a small city like Singapore. I estimate the whole cars, jobs, real estate, buy/sell market is worth at least S$40M this year in online classifieds alone and it is poised to grow dramatically once someones figures out how to handle more than 1 vertical at a time.
Who are the players?
Real Estate – No clear player yet. So this space is wide open for someone to come in and make good$$. Jobs – 5 main players. Combined at about 15M revenue by my estimate. (monster, jobscentral, jobsdb, jobstreet, 701)
Cars – sgcarmart, onemotoring Buy/sell – Mocca, Yahoo!, EBay Personals – Fridae, Trevvy (all Gay sites though)… where is the local large personals for straight population? I think in the next 3 years, you will see lots more ads, lots more competition and the winner will start to emerge.
Ultimately, I feel newspaper classifieds should shrink as more people see the benefits of online classifieds with its unlimited space, search engines and transactional capability. So to all the readers who are keen on internet businesses, i think online classifieds will grow at about 30% per year min. With margins of 20+%, to me it is a very attractive business.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)