“A hotel, a ski resort, an ultralight plane, crates of apples…” After fourteen years at the house, Antoine Jouteau, the boss of Leboncoin “Love looking at what people are selling there. It’s like window shopping”. The person who was the fifth hired by the peer-to-peer sales site when he arrived in 2009 – there are 1,500 today – has been, since August 2022, CEO of Adevinta, the parent company of Leboncoin. And he continues to shop on the platform. He bought his son’s pencil case and schoolbag there for the start of the school year, and even his home a few years ago.
If you find everything in this large online flea market – it brings together more than 68 million classified ads, i.e. “as many as French people”, jokes its manager – it itself had, for several months, been on the verge of being sold. And the news fell on Tuesday, November 21: Leboncoin will officially change ownership.
A consortium, led by the American funds Blackstone and British Permira and in which the American investment funds General Atlantic and TCV participate, announced on Tuesday that it had reached an agreement with the large shareholders of Adevinta to buy back their shares, at price of 115 Norwegian crowns (9.8 euros) per share. The offer, made through a vehicle called Aurelia, values Adevinta at 141 billion Norwegian crowns, or 12.1 billion euros, and will be partly financed in cash.
“Poker move”
Until now, Adevinta was majority-owned at 72.3% by a trio of investors: the Norwegian conglomerate Schibsted, present in the media (28.1%), the eBay group (33%) and the British investment fund Permira (11.2%), entered into the capital in 2021 for 1.9 billion euros. The rest is in the hands of the Stock Exchange. The operation, which had from its beginnings in mid-September, received ” support “ of Schibsted and eBay, will support the group’s change of ambition in Europe.
The rise of Adevinta is not new. To focus on online media and ads in Northern Europe, Schibsted first created and listed this entity on the Oslo Stock Exchange in 2019. But Adevinta’s “poker move” was made in 2020, with the purchase of the entire eBay Classifieds Group, the global classifieds branch of eBay Inc., three-quarters financed by an exchange of shares.
The 9.2 billion dollar operation (8.04 billion euros at the time) allowed the Norwegian to recover multiple sites, including Kleinanzeigen (the German equivalent of Boncoin, with a 25% higher audience) , Mobile.de (used vehicle specialist in Germany, which attracts 16 million unique visitors per month), and equivalents in Italy (Automobile.it), Australia (Auto Trader), the United Kingdom (Gumtree) , in Canada (Kijiji)…
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