Pixmania went from €900M French e-commerce leader to sold for scraps in seven years

Pixmania was founded in France in 2000 by brothers Steve and Jean-Emile Rosenblum as an online retailer of consumer electronics. It grew rapidly, reaching €900 million in annual revenue by 2012 and operating in 14 European countries. At its peak, Pixmania employed roughly 2,900 people and was one of Europe's largest dedicated e-commerce sites.

In 2006, DSG International (Dixons Retail, the UK's largest electronics chain) bought a 77% stake in Pixmania for €261 million, valuing the company at about €339 million. The acquisition was meant to give Dixons an online retail platform to compete with the rise of Amazon. Instead, integrating a French e-commerce culture with a British brick-and-mortar retailer proved difficult. The Rosenblum brothers were replaced, management churned, and the business struggled to adapt.

By the financial year ending April 2013, Pixmania was losing £31 million annually. Despite restructuring efforts, including cost cuts and operational changes, the losses continued to weigh on Dixons' overall performance. In September 2013, Dixons sold Pixmania to Mutares, a German turnaround holding company, for €69 million — a loss of roughly €192 million on the original investment. Mutares drastically downsized the business from its peak of thousands of employees to a few hundred.