With our background in the price comparison business, having founded PriceRunner in 1999, we have a few insiders in different places. With the recent sale of Kelkoo it was rumored that the selling price was “something less than €100 million” but it was actually quite a bit less than €100 million. We have inside sources close to the deal that gave us the exact number, 40 million GBP.

Yahoo acquired Kelkoo in 2004 for €475 million so they are taking quite a hit on this one, However Kelkoo hasn’t developed well since then and Yahoo has been trying to sell Kelkoo for over a year. Yahoo had spent considerable effort to first integrate Kelkoo into Yahoo and then over the last year trying to make Kelkoo as a separate business to prepare it for sale. Their efforts were fruitless so they integrated it back again and then finally separating it again and succeeded in selling for £40 million to the UK based private equity firm Jamplant Ltd.

The price might at first seem a bit low compared to other price comparison sites that has been sold during the last years. However Kelkoo has been underperforming and with the market values today there are many interesting profitable companies selling for less. It’s going to be interesting to see if Kelkoo are going to change their broker based business model and start focusing on user value and building loyal users instead of trying to over capitalize on every single page. We think users today demand more of a shopping site, users want more objective information and they need to be able to trust that the site giving the recommendations are doing so with the best intentions and not for a quick profit.

//Kristofer Arwin
CEO and Founder of technogog

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