"today announced they have signed a definitive agreement under which Yahoo! will acquire Kelkoo. Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo! will acquire up to 100 percent of the share capital of Kelkoo for an aggregate cash purchase price of approximately EUR 475 million, subject to certain adjustments."
I can’t believe Yahoo is going to waste more than half a billion dollars for this piece of junk. And I was starting to think Yahoo was finding its way again. Kelkoo is so bad it makes even Froogle shine in comparison, not to speak of its retarted approach to Internet shopping (with site silos based on individual countries — hello this is the EU, and with the weak dollar you might throw in the US as well). Google will probably tweak its algorithm to downplay Kelkoo’s currently well positioned millions of pages, and then what’s left?
I wouldn’t be surprised if the acquisition ended up being cheaper of even cancelled altogether, once Yahoo gets to the operational level and realizes what it is they’re purchasing. But if the deal goes through, this is one of the biggest successful exits in the dismal French internet world (which, to be totally fair, is at last moving in the right direction as far as DSL and VOIP are concerned, thanks in good part to Proxad). Smells like dot com stupidity all over again.
Or maybe Yahoo just wants to ditch Kelkoo altogether to have a clearer road ahead in European ecommerce. Yeah, that’s probably that, they can’t seriously think there’s anything to do with those sites and I doubt there’s much know-how Yahoo doesn’t already have. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, this is just consolidation at work rather than something supposed to bear fruit. The noise about keeping the brand run as a subsidiary with no impact on headcount is probably lip service to prevent a French strike. In the end, it’s easier to close a subsidiary altogether.