iProperty is a pretty big fish as one of Southeast Asia’s leading online property portal businesses. It’s about to be bought by an even bigger fish – REA Group, a News Corp subsidiary which owns property sites in Australia, China, US, and Europe.
This puts iProperty’s valuation at A$751 million ($534 million), one of the largest acquisitions of a Southeast Asian internet company in recent memory.
It’s uncertain how the purchase will be structured, though REA will either buy A$4 ($2.80) per share from iProperty shareholders, or offer each of them A$1.20 ($0.85) per share in cash and 0.7 shares.
For shareholders who bought in right after iProperty’s initial public offering, they’d make a nice 17x return, assuming they get A$4 per share. REA previously had a bite of iProperty, investing $100 million into the group.
iProperty booked A$24.8 million ($17.7 million) in revenue in the first three quarters of this year, though it saw a net loss after tax of A$1.55 million ($1.11 million) in the first half.
The acquisition would mark a complete exit for Patrick Grove and his Catcha Group, which remains the largest shareholder in the company. Not a bad result at all for Patrick, it seems. The largest exit to date was jobs portal Jobstreet, also from Malaysia, which got bought for $586 million.
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The buyout is good news for the Southeast Asian start-up scene. If the region can keep up its momentum, we should see billion-dollar exits soon.
This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.