I almost missed this in all the recent nattering about revenue-less companies, but in non-bubble technology finance news PriceGrabber.com was purchased yesterday by GUS plc., a U.K.-based financial conglomerate that also owns credit profiler Experian. The comparison shopping engine — my far-and-away favorite of its kind — was picked up in an all-cash $485mm deal.
Based on CY05 numbers of $60mm in sales and $25mm in EBIT, that works out to 8 times sales, or 19 times earnings. While that’s not cheap, it’s far from expensive either for a company that grew 50% year-over-year.
My favorite part of this story? Unless I’ve missed it, despite starting at the tippy top of the dot-com bubble in 1999, PriceGrabber took no venture capital. Instead it relied on being frugal at first, and then riding the cost curve down as technology prices plummeted in the following years. The result: Founder Kamran Pourzanjani and his team are about to walk away with very big — undiluted — paydays. Huge congrats to all involved.
You can find more here on GUS’s justification for the deal. There is more detailed financial comparative analysis here.
[Update] There is a useful recent (November) interview with PriceGrabber.com founder and CEO Kamran Pourzanjani here.
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Agree with you 100% – like everyone else you were probably so busy reading about del.icio.us (what was their EBIT again?;) and Alexa that you nearly missed this one.
Chris — You’re almost certainly correct. Sad but true.
This post has just showed up in Bloglines for I think the 5th time. Although some of this may be Bloglines’ fault, and some of it due to the (useful) update to the post, I am inclined to cast some of the blame on Feedflare. Is this fair?