Yahoo has been rumored to be selling Paris-based comparative shopping site Kelkoo for some time now, and it appears that they have found a buyer. Yahoo acquired Kelkoo in 2004 for €475 million.
The company has been sold to a UK-based private equity firm called Jamplant Ltd (update: here is a profile of the fund) for something less than €100 million, according to sources with knowledge of the deal.
Ex-Kelkoo CEO Pierre Chappaz announced the news on his blog (in french), and a copy of the internal email announcing the acquisition is below.
The company has lost much of its momentum since the Yahoo acquisition in the face of significant competition.
The email is below.
Hello Everyone,
It has been since summer since I gave you update email. I have waited because there are so many things nearing launch that I thought it best to wait till they had happened to give the update. Firstly, I would like to end the speculation from the last few months about the future of Kelkoo. Both Toby and I have announced that we were exploring strategic options for the business. One of the options that Laila and I were exploring, in fact pushing for, was to find it a new home for Kelkoo. I am pleased to announce, today, that we have done just that!
The new owners of Kelkoo are a UK based private equity company called Jamplant Ltd funded by several angel investors, and in their own words: “Jamplant Limited is very excited about the price comparison space, and being able to help Kelkoo continue its rapid growth. Philip Smyth, Chairman of Jamplant, believes that with our backing, Kelkoo should be able to accelerate its growth much faster as a standalone company . We are looking forward to working with the highly experienced and established management team at Kelkoo” Laila and I are also very excited about this new phase in the history of Kelkoo, accelerating the growth strategies we have put in place over the last year, and exploring new opportunities for all of us.
So, what does it mean to our daily lives as Kelkoo employees? We will carry on with the great work already in process. This is due to the fact that many people have been working hard behind the scenes to ensure a very smooth transition out of Yahoo! Today at 3pm GMT (4pm CET), we will schedule a video all hands for Kelkoo staff. Please ask any questions that are on your minds to Sasha ( —— ) before the meeting, we will do our best to answer during the broadcast.
I also want to update you on the things we are delivering on our top 3 priorities. Out of the new organization of Kelkoo last October, the Country Managers and the Exec Team have spent time thinking about and stretching our expectations of Kelkoo. That resulted in the following mission statement (slightly altered with the help of our new marketing director, Bernard):
Ø Kelkoo will be integral to the online retail experience by completely satisfying the needs of our users, helping them to find and discover what and where to buy. In doing this, we will ultimately deliver more buyers to retailers than any other site.
To achieve this, we have all been pushing on delivering on the following priorities:
* Fix the Search
o (Convergence) which has seen the launch of Search 5 in France and Netherlands and is currently showing nearly – - – % uplift on revenue per visit
o (Comprehensiveness) we have finalized the agreement with – - -, are working with them to
* Give more noticeable value to users thru creating Kelkoo Club
o – - – launched in all countries in July
o – - – launched in some countries in September
o Cash-Back launched in beta in the UK yesterday, and will launch in FR next week
* Build the Brand
o We have kicked off our own version of project Goldmine , to study and understand our customers and their needs. We have appointed three agencies to help us with the project, which should complete by the end of February. An exciting part of this project will be to interview some employees on “what is Kelkoo”, and feed that back to the business priorities we will establish over the next 6 months.So you can see, that we are delivering more and faster than ever in our history. Laila and I are proud of the work that has been done so far, and believe that the future of Kelkoo is really bright.
In closing, I feel that it is important to thank Yahoo! for all the investment and work that has gone into Kelkoo and our employees over the past 4 years. To list all of the people we will miss would take an age, but in particular, I would like to thank Toby and Jonathan Wolf for making the new chapter possible.
Regards,
Glen & Laila
So yang moves out and yahoo gets some cash. Got start guys…
yang is going to be terribly embarrassed.
Can’t blame Yang for this one. This was on Semel’s watch.
Tuyen
Things of this size is planned for many months before been approved.
–
New Site For College Students: http://www.inkampus.com
What is the deal price? Do u mean yahoo sold stuff they bought for $670 million at 100 million euros???? Thats insane..
Wow. Just goes to show what a great deal the original sale was for the founders.
What was Yahoo’s thinking here? Strategic? Bottom line related? And what other Yahoo-owned properties might be coming to market?
Staring to wonder about the long term viability of shopping comparison sites. Maybe it’s more of a niche play these days?
Jamplant Ltd.
http://wck2.com...239/compdetails
Incorporated 10/10/08.
hmmm.. you would have thought that Yahoo would have done something similar with this site and promoted it like MSN does with their comparison shopping service.. atleast included it in some of their search results… ahhh the waste of money on their end… (ridiculous)
loosing money, thats what happens when you buy overvalued companies.
congrats to the founders though.
€375m down the drain. Awesome. Selling it at such a price, just makes you wonder WHY. No profit?
And it has already been said, but yep, well done to the founders of Kelkoo. The original sale must of been closed by complete genius’… but not from Yahoo’s side of thing.
So what’s next? Not only do I mean this in the sense of what else it the big Y! going to prune of to streamline, but who else in the price comp industry is going under?
Don’t you just love credit crunching times – it gets rid of all the white noise/dead wood!
John
Yahoo seems to be workind hard by selling off dead/losing projects and getting in some cash!
I think Kelkoo has been wanting to get away from Yahoo for a long time as they feel it was dragging their ability to innovate down. They’ve got big plans for how they can develop price comparison – in their minds, it’s all about customer loyalty and integrating cashback and voucher codes.
The problem was that Yahoo never used it in the write way, they should of merged it into the search results and then they would have driven more traffic to it and users would of been happier.
Actually all the European managers, top and middle, during 2004 has been “cut” to let kelkoonian becoming the bosses of Yahoo! down in that continent… so the responsability of the today situation is more “inside” kelkoo than in the European yahoos… the decision to buy kelkoo has been taken on the US side…
yeah those kelkoo managers were proudly claiming that kelkoo took over, that they had all the power, that they were ruling yahoo now…
What a style and what good job they did!
You forgot to mention that most of the big management people quit after their mandatory time with Yahoo was over…
When was the last you used Kelkoo?
Pierre Chapaz explain crystal clear, in French, the difference between 475m and less than 100: ” The difference is the price of the incompetence of a management that drove yahoo stock price to $9″
Master Pierre, respects.
PS: ne me demandez pas le prix de la transaction, je sais juste qu’elle se situe en-dessous de 100 millions d’euros, alors que Yahoo! avait payé Kelkoo 475 millions en 2004. La différence, c’est le prix de l’incompétence d’un management qui a amené l’action Yahoo! sous les 9 dollars.
@andres – yes, that’s the feeling with most of the guys in Kelkoo. Now’s there chance to prove what they can do on their own.
finally good news coming from yahoo europe! kelkoo was never nothing else than a spam machine, that got blocked first by google search and later even by yahoo search.
Yahoo acquired them to hand over the management of the European business (since Y! didn’t know what to do with it), but their management style was awful, greedy and incompetent. The ones that didn’t retire (like Chapaz) after selling their spam business to Yahoo ruined the European team.
amen!
they did know nothing about the yahoo values, they had no care of the user, they did not care of the quality.
when the old yahoos tried to transmit them the yahoo values, were never heard.
But if they could do that it was because even the yahoo management was blind at that moment.
That management did not push for the integration but just let the kelkoos do whatever they wanted.
and their only good lesson was about seo.
all their business was based on seo.
seo on google.
a competitor….
I don’t think you have any inside information, or have just looked at it from the Yahoo point of view… The problem was not a lack of integration with Yahoo, but actually the other way around.
People from Kk are now opening big champagne bottles and communicating how happy they are. They hated Yahoo!
I wonder if this is just the beginning of Yahoo’s sales of non-core assets. You have to wonder what the future holds for businesses such as del.icio.us and MyBlogLog.
They built a nice scheme…
SEOs driving traffic to some overture-pages, overture then selling this traffic to … kelkoo … driving traffic to shops.
After Yahoo bought Overture and later Kelkoo they found out that all they got was a doorway page for SEOs.
Google found out the same and kicked first the seo pages, then the overture pages and finally kelkoo.
Shops buying now directly at Google adwords.
TC needs an Android app. This site is too heavy to load on 3G. Plusb android ad blovcker plus.
I agree with you chris , site is damn slow.
Plusb should be plus. Yahoo needs cash bad
I used to do SEO on the Kelkoo website years back. We kicked ass on rankings. Yahoo came in and bought them and then “phased me out” as the SEO consultant. Rankings and traffic never were the same since. Could have seen this coming for some time.
Wow .. so you costed Yahoo a cool 300 million euros. Tell your current employer this .. so that they don’t make the same mistake.
“Wow .. so you costed Yahoo a cool 300 million euros. Tell your current employer this .. so that they don’t make the same mistake.”
That doesnt make any sense.
Yahoo cost themselves 300 million for not know how to even optimize a website themselves. I was let go after the Yahoo came aboard, duuuuh.
jaan, c’mon man, you KNOW kelkoo was a spam machine, perfectly setup to make yahoo pay a ton of money (to a friend of the then Y! COO) for nothing.
and you also know how obnoxious the kk management was, mediocre people thinking they were the coolest kid in town, not willing to embrace the yahoo culture. On the contrary, kelkoos kept considering themselves a different company for years…
did you ever consider that Internet may not be just kicking ass on rankings?
Yes I do Frank. Do you realize that when I worked for them it was like 2002-3? Long time ago and things have drastically changed since then.
that link up there (Google trends) should be to kelkoo.co.uk not kelkoo.com. The fall is less drastic that way.
lol, yes you are right.
Kelkoo used to have uk.kelkoo.com, but switched to http://www.kelkoo.co.uk (gradually I think), so it’s not so strange after all.
Does nobody think that Yahoo made enough money from Kelkoo in the last years, so that they don’t really lose with this deal? Couldn’t this also be an explanation?
I was thinking that – would be interesting to know how much revenue Kelkoo contributed to Y! during the time they were Y! owned and operated — could just be Y! cutting their losses.
Rofl. Yahoo lost a shitload of money with Kelkoo, once Google changed their ranking so SEO spamming stopped working.
This should help Yahoo !!
Reminds me of McAfee, who turned into Network Associates through merger with Network General, bought a bunch of good businesses, failed to combine them into anything homogenous, sold them off for half price (including selling Sniffer to Network General), and turned back into McAfee.
Yahoo! have also laid off the entire engineering team in Munich Germany today. Tough.
Don’t know exactly … about 14 great engineers, most of them 5 to 10 years of service @Y, about 20 “Yahoo Odyssey Awards” and 2 or 3 “Yahoo Star Awards” (surely, internal awards, but still they say something about the quality of those folds). I’ve heard this costs Y! at least half a million Euros in compensation and so much knowledge and excellence. Very stupid, very sad.
yahooooooooooooooooooo
Did yahoo stock rise cos of this?
Oh btw
Check out http://www.jobstaxi.com
New Jobs. CauseForce. Strands. Carbine Studios. NCsoft.
@ Frank (Frank Fuchs?). Well, there’s no doubting your opinion on the matter
. With such hostility towards Kelkoo I’m not surprised they feel the same about you. The ones I’ve met have been perfectly nice people!
I’m not an insider like you, but I don’t think the existing Kelkoo staff hold grudges against Kelkoo staff – I’m sure they understand why their business has been under invested in the last few years, given it’s just not aligned to Yahoo!s goals. Sad, but true.
I imagine their celebration is mostly relief that, whilst Y! is dying from the top down at the moment and shareholders are turning away in their droves, this Jamplant company has looked at the Kelkoo business and seen something they really like and believe in. Kelkoo has a future; an investor wanting to inject cash and give Kelkoo a chance. The fact that Jamplant seem to have ‘got it cheap’ only makes it even better for Kelkoo staff because the expectations on them will be lower. Yahoo!, on the other hand, with it’s 15% cuts across Europe and a general feeling of ‘hanging on’ rather than building for the future, is a sad place to be.
Maybe your comments come from a little bit to bitterness that Kelkoo has been given a new future whilst Yahoo! continues to slide? I can understand that; I’d do the same in your shoes.
@Brian just so that you know the above Frank is not me.
OK
http://www.batt...ies-charger.com
F*** you Chappaz! The problem was not Y!’s culture but Kelkoo beeing a piece of crap company with the shittiest product ever seen. Only business model was to spam Google by “SEO”. This failed when Google changed their indexing and the Kelkoo page was so crappy that even if some customer stumbled into it he was not able to find anything he searched.
This damn deal only happend as you guys were friends with Dan Rosensweig. Oh, talking about culture. The culture inside of Kelkoo was and is to have a bunch if idiots working for them which are not able to make any decision by themselfes, always play super safe. This culture f***** in the a** when they started to have Kelkoo donkies as “service engineers”. Thx for all and I hope you go broke soon. Regards, some ex Yahoo! europe employee.
Ooh handbags! If Kelkoo are so useless and ineffectual why do you hold such contempt for them?
As much as I have heard. The price was much higher than 125 mio but Yahoo! hasn´t announced the price yet. Considering what Microsoft paid for ciao and that Kelkoo is the biggest price comparison in Europe, 125 mio don´t seem right.
@Ex Y: you seem quite hurt…(is it because they fired you?). I think the Kelkoo product is the best on the market!
Guys – you’ve got to see that fundamentally the Kelkoo product is one of price comparison in helping people find the best price to buy something. How can you argue this has no value to a customer? In fact, I would argue it has a lot more value than these pure arbitrage plays you see in voucher code sites who try and get Google rankings for merchants who don’t even have nay voucher codes – just to get the last cookie before purchase. They are the ones that should be hit by the Kelkoo algorithm.
Yes, some of the marketing techniques were a bit aggressive and arguably went too far and, yes, the team they built did start to get far too arrogant – but I think those people have now gone.
There are some top guys at Kelkoo who have a real chance to improve the customer value even further now and we should give them that opportunity.
If I was to be in their shoes right now, I’d start cutting some costs and streamlining the teams to get rid of anyone who doesn’t fundamentally believe in the real customer value proposition of finding people the best deal. Integrate quality, above board voucher codes and cashback (which they are doing), and go back to the real roots of why this thing started. It’s definitely achievable.
Was the decline in value simply due to it being overvalued at the point of sale (despite it potential) or more to do with the fact that Yahoo did nothing with it and let it lose momentum like some of their other offerings?
http://trends.g...=all&sort=0
not that it looks good now, but much better than before…
Consumers are definitely less using Kelkoo, this is old, commercialy based and lots of competitors are rising up…
And what about Twenga ? I heard they multiplied their 2008 income by 6 !
Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Bid; Walks Away From Deal (Updated) — Microsoft will announce shortly that they have withdrawn their offer to acquire Yahoo.
At the end we have only three left: Microsoft, Bought Greenfield Kelkoo and Ebay bought Shopping.com
Smaller price comparison motors like comparum.eu don’t have a change anymore to grow big.