Ebay Inc is said to be pressing ahead urgently with plans to sell its $10bn classified ads business. It is believed that private equity firms including TPG, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman are interested in the deal, as are trade buyers. Prominent among these is the South Africa-based Naspers whose classifieds operations include: OLX, letgo, Avito and Dubizzle, with more than 400m monthly active users around the world across 30+ markets, with revenues of almost $1bn.
A projected Axel Springer acquisition of eBay classifieds would, it is believed, be subject to challenging competition investigation in Germany and the EU.
Other bidders could include: News Corp, which has strong property digitals, especially in Australia and the US; and Adevinta (the $6bn classifieds spin-off from Nordic news group Schibsted) which operates ‘boot sale’ digital marketplaces in 16 countries in Europe, Latin America and North Africa. Its leading brands include Leboncoin in France, InfoJobs (Spain), Shpock (UK), OLX (Brazil), Subito (Italy) and Jofogás (Hungary).
