The US Division of Rakuten should buy Local Corp (like 10 years ago Linkshare from Internet Capital/Actua) for an overtake of debts of less than 20 million and an offer of shares of Rakuten to the existing shareholders of Local Corp for additional 20 - 30 million.
CLEVELAND, OH – March 19, 2015 — OverDrive, Inc., the leading eBook, audiobook and streaming video platform for libraries and schools, today announced it entered into an agreement to be acquired by Rakuten Inc., one of the world’s largest Internet services companies. Insight Venture Partners has been the majority shareholder of OverDrive since 2010. OverDrive (will operate as a subsidiary of Rakuten USA and will work closely with other Rakuten companies.
Rakuten USA, headquartered in Boston, is the United States operating division of Rakuten. Rakuten companies provide a variety of consumer and business-focused services including eReading (Kobo), e-commerce, instant messaging (Viber), and others in the US, Canada and around the world. Since 2012 has been ranked among the world’s “Top 20 Most Innovative Companies” in Forbes magazine’s annual list. As part of the Rakuten family, OverDrive will take advantage of the global reach, scale and technologies throughout Rakuten’s portfolio. Once the transaction closes, OverDrive will operate as a subsidiary of Rakuten USA, and continue to be led by CEO Steve Potash, with its headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio. Kobo, headquartered in Toronto, Canada, and OverDrive will work together to enhance their abilities to deliver world-class digital content and reading technology services. The acquisition is expected to close in the next thirty days.
“I am excited for OverDrive to be part of the dynamic group of market leading e-commerce and digital media companies that Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani has assembled,” said OverDrive CEO Steve Potash. “From OverDrive’s world headquarters in northeast Ohio to the 50 countries in which our library and school partners reside, we will continue to connect readers with books and institutions by supporting all users and all popular devices, while promoting open industry standard formats and best practices. We look forward to working closely with the Rakuten companies.
We’ve heard PopSugar is the latest online content company that Japanese conglomerate Rakuten is about to snap up. These things could always fall apart, but should the deal go through, we’re told it will happen in the next couple of weeks and that Rakuten will buy PopSugar for $580 million.
To put this in perspective, AOL bought the Huffington Post, putting forth a combined 117 million unique U.S. visitors per month at the time for $300 million in 2011. PopSugar gets about 41 million unique visitors per month, according to the site.
While that seems like a huge purchase price for an online celebrity news site, it follows on the heels of several other pricey content acquisitions for Rakuten in the last couple of years, including digital content distributor OverDrive for $410 million last month. We’re told that Rakuten gets a lot of inbound acquisition requests and that it is willing to pay top dollar for digital content companies, in particular.
According to a source familiar with the matter, PopSugar has been shopping itself around for the last couple of months and Rakuten, with about $16 billion in the bank, looked like a lucrative choice to the online media site.
Rakuten bought Ebates in 2014 for 1,000 million.
ICG ANNOUNCES LINKSHARE’S AGREEMENT TO BE ACQUIRED BY RAKUTEN, INC. FOR $425 MILLION
Wayne, Pa – September 6, 2005 – Internet Capital Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: ICGE), today announced that its partner company, LinkShare Corporation, and Rakuten, Inc. (JASDAQ: 4755), entered into a merger agreement pursuant to which LinkShare would be acquired for approximately $425 million in cash. Rakuten is Japan’s most diversified Internet portal with the number one sites in Japan for on-line shopping, travel, golf reservations, community and greeting cards. The transaction is expected to close within four to six weeks, subject to customary closing conditions.
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