It’s acquiring the 20 percent of social network Odnoklassniki.ru it does not already own from founder Albert Popkov, Vedomosti reports (via Quintura).
The deal has been cleared by Russia’s Federation Antimonopoly Service (here) on the grounds it will not adversely lead to market concentration.
An analyst quoted by Vedmosti estimates the deal to be worth $14 to $28 million to Popkov.
The site is beginning to make advertising tick. It more than doubled 2009 annual revenue to 1.54 billion rubles ($48.6 million) from 2008, leading to 9.4 times higher net profit of 39 million rubles ($1.6 million).
Digital Sky spent a reported $400 million buying up Facebook stock last year, and followed up that investment by leading huge rounds at what are arguably the two hottest internet startups right now, Zynga and Groupon. It also beat out several other bidders to buy IM service ICQ from AOL (NYSE: AOL) for $187.5 million in late April.
South Africa’s outward-looking Naspers last month took a 28.7 percent stake in DST in return for giving it $388 million and 39.3 percent of Mail.ru. Naspers already owned 30 percent of China’s Tencent, which itself owns 10 percent of DST.
DST plans to float in London at some point in the next two or three years, but its IPO talk has already been on-again, off-again for a year or two. An early 2011 date was speculated by WSJ recently.
DST had previously taken ownership of 60 percent of Odnoklassniki when it acquired 75 percent of pan-Russia-and-Baltic social network holding company Forticom, which also owns stakes in Vkontake and in One in Lithuania and Latvia. Then DST had bought up the rest of Forticom, giving it 80 percent of Odnoklassniki.
The site, “Classmates” in English, claims 45 million registered users and 10 million daily visitors. It trails Vkontake for registered users.
It was founded by Popkov in 2006. The owner of the UK’s 192.com phone lookup site I-CD in 2008 sued Popkov, claiming he started the site whilst working for it, and therefore that it owned Odnoklassniki.ru. But it dropped the case in November.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-dst-taking-full-control-of-russian-social-net-odnoklassniki.ru/
