Yahoo paid €475M for Kelkoo and sold it for under €100M

Kelkoo was a Paris-based price-comparison service founded in 1999 by Pierre Chappaz, Jérôme Mercier and Mauricio Lopez. It grew by buying rivals — a UK shopping site, a Spanish one and a Norwegian one — until it was Europe's biggest comparison shopping engine, profitable since the last quarter of 2002 and serving nine countries with about 250 staff. Its money came from fees sellers paid when shoppers clicked through. For a four-year-old start-up, it was the kind of asset the mid-2000s shopping boom made look priceless.

On 26 March 2004 Yahoo bought Kelkoo for €475 million in cash — about £320 million — its first big move in European e-commerce. Yahoo's then-CEO Terry Semel was assembling a portfolio of properties to diversify revenue and sell advertising against; the Kelkoo purchase followed his buys of search firm Overture and web company Inktomi. Semel said Kelkoo would 'add depth and breadth' to Yahoo's services. Chappaz promised the deal would let Kelkoo 'extend its leading presence in Europe'.

The momentum did not survive the merger. TechCrunch reported at the time of the eventual sale that Kelkoo 'has lost much of its momentum since the Yahoo acquisition in the face of significant competition' — Google's shopping listings were taking the traffic that had made Kelkoo valuable. Inside Yahoo, the French business was one asset among many in a company sliding toward crisis: its share price fell below $9 in late 2008 and CEO Jerry Yang was stepping down, and by then Yahoo had been 'exploring strategic options' for Kelkoo for some time.

On 21 November 2008 Yahoo sold Kelkoo to Jamplant, a British private-equity firm, for less than €100 million — under a quarter of the 2004 price. The business still employed 270 people in Paris, Grenoble and London and claimed 50 million users across ten countries, but the buyer paid a fraction of what Yahoo had. Chappaz's parting shot: 'the difference is the price of management incompetence that led Yahoo's share price under nine US dollars.' Kelkoo went on operating as an independent company, bought France's LeGuide in 2016 and rebranded as Kelkoo Group.