Tag: acquisition

Ras2Ras Social Rating Platform Acquired By Qatari Investor

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ras2rasRas2Ras, the Yemen-based online social rating and comparison platform, that was previously covered here, has been acquired by Qatari investor Ahmed Alaji.

Ras2Ras, which was founded by Amad Almsaodi in 2008, was built around a very simple yet really interesting idea: putting any two comparable things against each other, and letting people vote on which they like best.

Now, even though the tool’s idea is very simple in principle, it could be used for a number of research and user engagement purposes by businesses, with the potential to be a source of some really interesting and useful insights and information.

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Abraaj Capital Acquires Riyada Ventures To Lead New SME Push

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Abraaj Capital

Riyada Ventures

Abraaj Capital, the Dubai-based private equity firm has announced that it has signed a deal to fully acquire Riyada Ventures, the venture capital firm based in Jordan.

The acquisition is at the core of a new push by Abraaj into the small and medium enterprise (SME) space, which is aimed at stimulating and supporting entrepreneurial activity in this vital segment of the MENA region’s economies.

Riyada Ventures, which was set up in the Jordanian capital, Amman, in 2005, and has an office in Cairo, just won the ‘Venture Capital Firm of the Year’ award for a second straight year at the Private Equity World MENA 2009 conference in Dubai just a few days ago.

Following the acquisition, Riyada will be folded into Abraaj and renamed Riyada Enterprise Development Company (REDCO), with Khaldoon Tabaza, the Riyada chief executive, continuing at the helm.

This new subsidiary will be investing growth capital in small and medium-sized businesses, with plans for Abraaj to provide $200m of its own capital, with expectations that amount will grow much larger.

The company will provide what Arif Naqvi, the chief executive of Abraaj, called “patriotic capital” through partnerships with governments in the region to foster the expansion of small and medium-sized businesses.

REDCO will try to follow on the footsteps of Abraaj’s earlier SME successes, including the shipping and logistics firm Aramex and internet company Maktoob, which was recently acquired by Yahoo!.

For companies in which it invests, Abraaj will provide a dedicated back-office platform to offer both strategic support services and operational functionality to facilitate growth plans and provide mentorship to the young entrepreneurs in the SME space, which comprises more than 80% of economic activity across the MENA region.

The acquisition comes at an active period for Abraaj, which also announced it had raised $375 Million, increasing its capital to $1.5 Billion, aiming for property investments in the region and looking to broaden its asset management offerings.

Egyptian Mrrha Acquired By UAE Company Creative Solutions

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MrrhaMrrha, an Arab online service  that was launched from Egypt around a simple idea to allow users to upload a file and mirror it directly on up to five popular uploading sites of choice, has been acquired by Emirati company Creative Solutions.

Mrrha was launched in November 2008 by brothers Mahmoud and Ahmed El-Masoudy from Egypt, aiming to make the process of uploading files to the internet for sharing purposes and mirroring them on the most famous file uploading services a lot easier and faster.

Mrrha depends on a parallel uploading mechanism to make this possible, which means that the file will be uploaded to Mrrha and sent to the other uploading sites at the same time, making it so that the user won’t have to wait until it’s uploaded to each site.

Creative SolutionsCreative Solutions, the acquiring company, is a web development company founded by Khamis AlSharyani in 2008, based in Alain (UAE), that provides web consulting, solutions and services for its clients. The company is a subsidiary of Bin Majed group.

The details of the deal have not been made public.

Yahoo! Maktoob Acquisition Deal Completed

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Yahoo!
Maktoob

The Yahoo! – Maktoob acquisition deal that was announced last August, has officially closed today at noon (UAE time).

It had already been announced upon signing the definitive agreement back in August that the deal was expected to be sealed in the fourth quarter of the year.

So starting noon today, Maktoob.com and all its sub-divisions (including Maktoob Research, Bentelhalal and others) are officially part of Yahoo!, marking the completion of the first major deal of its kind in the region.

The first steps for the company are to work on introducing flagship products like Yahoo! Mail and Instant Messenger in Arabic, as well as the Yahoo! Maktoob Arabic homepage; then to keep moving on to provide other Yahoo! services in Arabic, and help enrich Arabic content online. Other local services for the region will also be considered and developed.

[Full Disclosure: I have personally been working with Maktoob.com ever since the beginning of 2009.]

AdMob To Be Acquired By Google For $750 Million In Stock

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AdMobJust a few hours earlier, it was announced that a definitive agreement was signed for mobile advertising network AdMob to be acquired by Google for $750 Million in stock.

AdMob was founded in January 2006 by Lebanese entrepreneur Omar Hamoui, as a mobile advertising marketplace, offering solutions for discovery, branding and monetization on the mobile web. It was able to attract investments from Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, DFJ Growth Fund and Northgate Capital.

The company grew to take a lead in display advertising on smartphone platforms, such as Apple’s iPhone OS and Google’s Android, working with thousands of advertisers to serve mobile ads on their publisher network of over 15,000 websites and mobile applications. AdMob received 10.2 billion total ad requests in September of this year, and has served more than 125 billion mobile ads since its inception.

With this deal Google aims to strengthen their push into mobile advertising, complementing the solutions they already have, and roll out more effective tools for creating, serving and analyzing emerging mobile ad formats.

The deal should also bring mobile advertising to the forefront and get more people interested in the space.

Google has created a specific site to talk about the AdMob deal and its benefits here: Google’s acquisition of AdMob.

This deal marks Google’s second acquisition of a company founded by an Arab entrepreneur, the first being their September 2007 acquisition of mobile social network Zingku, that was founded by Jordanian entrepreneur Sami Shalabi in May 2006.

UAE Based Startup Sphere Networks To Be Acquired By Major Taiwanese Manufacturer

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Sphere NetworksSphere Networks is currently in acquisition talks with a major Taiwanese manufacturer to sell off the majority of the company, including the intellectual property rights to its network management software technology, supporting research and development team.

Sphere Networks is a developer of enterprise-level network management solutions, that allow organizations to monitor and control thousands of nodes at any one time.

The name of the acquiring company hasn’t been disclosed, but Mohamed Hamedi, CEO and founder of Sphere Networks said that the potential buyer is “the largest OEM hardware manufacturer for networking equipment” in Taiwan. It produces switches, routers, access points and similar products mainly for other vendors, but now wants to start shifting to producing its own-brand products.

After the official announcement Sphere Networks will be fully folded into the acquiring company, including its IP, technology and supporting technical team of 20 employees. It is expected that staff working in sales and human resources will be cut as a result of the process though.

The company was launched in 2005 by Mohamed Hamedi, a Libyan national who moved from the US to Dubai to start the company and personally bankrolled it, until Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority invested in the startup in 2006, and then another investment by Intel Capital followed in 2008. The values of both of those investments were not disclosed.

As part of an earn out agreement, Hamedi should continue to work with Sphere Networks for up to 18 months following the deal.

[Source: ITP]

Yahoo! Maktoob: It’s Official, Yahoo! Acquiring Largest Arab Community Maktoob

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Yahoo!
Maktoob

After months of rumors and speculation by many in the Arab internet industry, today the news is confirmed and made public officially: Yahoo! is acquiring Maktoob.com, making its big step into the Arab world by acquiring the biggest online Arab community.

A press conference was held at the Fairmont Hotel in Dubai to announce the deal with top executives from Maktoob and the Yahoo! Emerging Markets team.

The deal only involves the Maktoob.com portal and its sub-divisions (including Maktoob Research, Bentelhalal and others), that will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yahoo!.

The other sister companies within the Maktoob Group which are: Souq.com, CashU, Tahadi, Araby and the newly acquired E-marketing MENA (which will be rebranded to Ikoo) are not part of the deal, and they will go on with business as usual under the group’s umbrella.
Following this deal, the group will be rebranding to Jabbar Internet Group (JIG), injected with a $20 million investment, and chaired by Samih Toukan.

The first steps after the deal closing in Q4, will be to work on introducing the Yahoo! Maktoob Arabic homepage, as well as Mail and Instant Messenger in Arabic; then to keep moving on to providing other Yahoo! services in Arabic, and enriching Arabic content online. Other local services for the region will also be considered and developed.

The financial details of the deal have not been made public, although many numbers have been floating around the internet over the past weeks and months, none of which have been confirmed by either companies.

This is the first time in the history of the internet in the Arab world that such a deal has taken place, and promises to take the internet industry in the region to a whole new level; hopefully in terms of quality, content, competition, awareness and investment opportunities.

When looking at other global players, Google chose to open small presences of its own, mainly in the UAE and Egypt, to work on some product concept development, marketing and sales in the region. Microsoft already have a wide existence in the Arab world, but mainly around their big software titles, only recently starting to look online in the Arab world.

Hopefully this deal, as well as Google and Microsoft’s moves in the region, will open the door for more international players to start seriously considering entering the online market in the Arab world, but even more importantly will show local investors the potential that exists in investing in sound internet startup ideas, and that with the region as an important emerging market, there are more exit strategies than they initially thought.

For more information on this, you can check out the story and the press release on Maktoob Business.

[Full Disclosure: I have been a Director of a Maktoob.com division ever since the beginning of 2009, and therefore haven’t been able to report on this story any earlier.]

D1G Acquires Popular Jordanian Forum E7ki

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D1GD1G recently announced that it has acquired the popular Jordanian forum “E7ki“, one of the biggest in Jordan, to integrate it into the D1G network of websites.

The E7ki forum now operates under the D1G domain name, and is now in public beta, awaiting to be relaunched with a new design and more features.

E7ki is the fifth acquisition by D1G after websites like: “Ya Sater”, 7asnaa, 66g and “Seen Jeem”.

This acquisition follows a trend that some Arab web companies like D1G, Maktoob and others are following; acquiring popular websites and forums to quickly boost their number of users, as well as the page views and visits they generate, in order to attract more online advertisers, thereby generating more advertising income for them.