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February 24, 2007
Italy's Dada Acquires Stake in Blog Publisher Blogo.it - Latest In String of Small Acquistions
The company behind Italian blog network Blogo.it has taken on a strategic investment from Dada Spa, a quick growing Italian web, Internet, and mobile service provider.
Blogging Entrepreneurs - You Just Can't Beat Europe For Stylish Founders And Digs.
The amount invested is €720K we believe -- for a 30 percent stake -- and an option to acquire 100 percent in two year's time (Please take our numbers as tentative for the time-being. We had to interpret a bizarre Google translation of the Italian press article that we linked to below).
The company behind Blogo is called E-Box S.r.l. and it has four founders and no employees. It claims 50 bloggers in its network and ad and sponsorship revenues of about 420K euros last year. The network generates 16M page views and about 3.3M visits (quoting Audiweb/Nielsen, stats for early 2007).
Maybe one of our Italian-speaking readers will let us know if we got the numbers right?
The deal implies a valuation of the two year old Blogo.it network of €2.3M.
In the Blogo.it corporate blog, the quote below shows the founders know what their getting themselves into now they've taken on outside capital:
The concrete results for the founders of Blogo.it will be very straightforward: after two years of working until late evening, now is the time for working until dawn, to complete existing projects and start working on new initiatives.
The deal is the latest in a string of small-sized acquisitions for Dada (CEO Angelo Falchetti pictured right), founded way back in 1995, which makes it a bubble era survivor, by the way.
Besides the Blogo.it stake, the company acquired in the past year Spanish Nominalia, domain registrar, UPOC Networks, a US Internet and mobile value added service provider, and it paid €4.5M for Tipic the NY-based company behind Italian blog and social networks operator Splinder, as well as Motime.
It does €112M a year in annual sales (2006) with a 13.5 percent margin and is listed on the Italian Stock Exchange. Its market cap is about €298M at the moment.
Read - blogo.it » Dada entra in Blogo.it
Read - Repubblica.it | Finanza
Posted on February 24, 2007 07:02 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Permalink
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