IPO
The German e-commerce company Zalando sold 24.5 million shares on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange Wednesday, raising €605 million. The deal gives the company a €5.3 billion valuation based on the share price it set of €21.50, the price to which shares returned at Wednesday’s market close. Two-thirds of Zalando’s over €1 billion in revenue comes from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, but it expects to use some of the capital raised to grow its global presence.
Rocket Internet, a German startup incubator and early investor in Zalando, listed on Frankfurt’s Stock Exchange Thursday, the day after Zalando. While founder Oliver Samwer went on record to say that the model for his company’s IPO was Alibaba, the results were decidedly not as good. After opening at €42.50, shares in the company fell over 10% almost immediately to €38.00 and finished the day even lower, at €37.00. Despite the poor public market response, Rocket Internet did end up raising €1.4 billion, nearly double its initial estimate.
Box, the cloud storage company that originally filed for its IPO in March, reportedly will not go public until 2015. While the company has cited unfavorable market conditions, analysts believe that it has more to do with a worrisome burn rate and continued failure to turn a profit.
M&A
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp will pay $950 million in an all-cash deal to buy 80% of Move Inc., a network of property listings websites that includes Realtor.com and Move.com. The company, which owns The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, will leverage the acquisition to support its declining revenue from classified ads. The deal is expected to close by the end of the calendar year. The remaining 20% of Move, Inc. will be controlled by REA Group, in which News Corp. has a 61.6% interest. Describing the motivations for the deal on the company’s website, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said: “In addition to boosting Move’s subscription, advertising, and software services, this acquisition will give News Corp. a significant marketing platform for our media assets, which will benefit from the high-quality geographic data generated by real estate searches.”
The Japanese Internet and telecom conglomerate SoftBank, which already has major stakes in Sprint and Alibaba, is reportedly eyeing DreamWorks Animation as an acquisition target. Rumors suggest that SoftBank offered $32 per share, and $3.4 billion overall to buy the film production company, but that interest has cooled after the initial offer was made. If the deal does go through, it would be in line with the current trend in the media and telecom industries towards consolidation. Just this year, it has been announced that Comcast will buy Time Warner Cable, and AT&T will buy DirecTV. Meanwhile SoftBank, through Sprint, had pursued buying T-Mobile in August, around the same time that talks between News Corp and Time Warner, Inc. broke down.