Auction sales: eBay takes over iBazar

We were talking about it (see article 'Ventes aux enchères : eBay racheterait iBazar'. It is now done. On Thursday morning, February 22nd, eBay, the auction sales world leader on the Internet announced the acquisition of iBazar, French leader already highly implanted in Europe. The transaction was announced for an amount comprised in a very large price bracket: between 66 and 112 million dollars.

EBay and iBazar are extremely complementary as estimated the managers of the two companies. The American giant developed in the United States, in Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea, United Kingdom and then implanted in Germany, France, Austria and Italy. The French leader expanded rapidly in Europe: Italy, Spain, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, Portugal.

This merge which occurred by redemption of shares will certainly weaken a bit more the start-up of Sophia called Aucland, another auction sales company redeemed by Europ@web in September 1999. According to web audience monitoring organizations, Aucland, in terms of their number of visitors reached around 240 000 in December 2000 against about 700 000 for iBazard and 160 000 for eBay which didn’t succeed in France but is starting again by an important acquisition...