Estonia’s Forticom, which runs Lithuanian social network one.lt and owns a 25% stake in Russian social network Odnoklassniki.ru, has acquired a controlling stake in Polish web portal nasza-klasa for 200 million PLN, or about $92 million.
This comes from a couple of reports - the Warsaw Business Journal says nasza-klasa has about 7.5 million monthly users and reported the price above. iol technology is also reporting this separately with confirmation from the company, along with some background information on the site and founder Maciej Popowicz:
Created just a year-and-a-half ago by 24-year-old Maciej Popowicz, a computing student in the south-west Polish hi-tech hub of Wroclaw, nasza-klasa.pl works on the same principles as Britain’s Friends Reunited and France’s Copains d’avant.
It has taken Poland’s Internet world by storm, and claims 11 million users, giving it widest coverage and penetration in this country of 38 million people, well ahead of YouTube’s 6,4 million Polish-based users.
Thanks for not forgetting about Poland.
They bought that controlling stake back in January.
The Polish Gazeta.pl portal conducted an interview with Vitaly Rubstein, the CEO of Forticom, who said he wants his European portals to take on Facebook in the long run.
Link to machine translation of the interview: http://tinyurl.com/5jmqeu
Maybe 200 000 000 PLN? )
I have never seen anything about Poland here - big surprise.
Bravo, this goes to show that there’s a big market there.
Here in the US the estimates are 10 million polish + polish-americans. My wife’s family uses the portal addictively, mostly the eldest love it to get in contact with school friends from decades ago.
Another website that I see its very popular among polish and polish americans is a classfifieds site called http://bazarynka.com/
Nice that you covered this.
Just to add
Previously 20% stake was bought by European Founders, it was when Nasza-Klasa.pl was worth something like 15mln PLN
These values are not exact (no one shares the info) , but 20% was like 3-5mln PLN then
Forticom now owns 70% of nasza-klasa.pl
And they bought part of this 70% from European Founders
So they (European Founders) earned nice money on this transaction
anyway, this is the best Polish startup recently
Nice to see techcrunch widening their reporting activity to include acquisitions in the rising Eastern Europe. The problem for journalists might be that acquisition prices tend to be highly classified information for both parties around here. Seemingly things are moving to a better direction.
Estonia might see some more interesting events, regardless of the recent slowing down of their economy after the past few hot years. Their tax regime supports growth really effectively by levying corporate income tax only when profit is distributed as e.g. dividends.
Are you sure about the value of this transaction ? – I asking because in Poland this value was presented as a alaitycs estimation
Heh, that’s quite funny. This portal actually has popularity of 4chan.org or rotten.com. basically only old users are interested in it, everyone else thinks it’s just a pile of cr*p…
Picky point - the site is one.lt not one.It (as written, you link to the correct site).
Another website that I see its very popular among polish and polish americans is a site called http://www.jeden.com
This deal was meant to happen.
See the Russian angle to the deal on http://blog.quintura.com
lol
http//www.iloggo.com is also Polish…you can choose icons of your favourites websites and put them on your web dashboard. And you can even crop the icon from any fragment of web site
Very useful!
http://www.iloggo.com is also Polish…you can choose icons of your favourites websites and put them on your web dashboard. And you can even crop the icon from any fragment of web site
Very useful!
Good coverage Mike, I like to hear about what’s going outside of the US/UK etc. There might not be as much advertising money, but there sure are a lot of eyeballs.
Good cover. Another example that local copycat runs better than foreign tiger. Some American are going to be upset for this.
Here’s a nice short video about Warsaw technology, some views and aspects of it. A couple of years ago, Poland was well behind but since then, they have started to pick up. Being in the top group of European countries - from amount of internet users.
nasza-klasa.pl good cover nice website web2.0