Moneysupermarket - The IPO

The History

Founded in 1999 by Cameron and Nixon and attracting 64m visitors last year. It is now set for a £1bn floatation with trading scheduled for the 31st July. With 4m registered users and a 49% market share, it explains the £105m turnover in 2006. Expansion is set to include acquisitions in Europe and further spending of £16m on UK advertising in 2008. Now the facts and the debate…

The Facts

Entire share capital valued at just under £1bn
This month’s planned share offering is between 170p and 210p
The IPO raises £388m at the mid-point of that range
40% of shares will be sold
In 2006, it generated and adjusted EBITDA of £33.0 million
Moneysupermarket employs (as March 2007) 531 staff in Ewloe, North Wales
Mr. Nixon, Chief Executive stands, to make £115m from the sale of 60.3m
Mr. Cameron, Co Founder, will sell 22.5m shares at floatation representing his entire 5% stake
£180m raised by the IPO will be used to pay back the loan used to persuade Cameron to leave
More money will be used for mergers and acquisitions, possibly in France or Spain
Credit Suisse has been appointed sole sponsor, global coordinator and bookrunner
Lehman Brothers and UBS are co-lead managers

The Debate

Moneysupermarket is facing strong competition in the insurance arena from confused.com (and their ~~potential float~~ now cancelled) as well as other small comparison sites hot on their heels
Moneysupermarket denied that they were dropped from Google a few weeks ago
Moneysupermarket have always used unethical link building techniques
Direct Line have just launched an aggresive advertising campaign lambasting price comparison sites
Many think the IPO is not without risks
Moneysupermarket have always used a ‘per click’ business model, which enourages poor customer service
Mr Cameron left the business five years ago after he fell out with Mr Nixon and has not had been involved with the company since

Further Information

INFO
Wikipedia
About Us
SEO
Zippy
SEOMoz
TRAFFIC
Compete
Alexa
Quantcast
Google Trends
Technorati

Comments

1 Comment so far

Crowdstorm (blog) » Yahoo selling Kelkoo (or divesting as they call it) on October 3, 2007 12:52 pm
[...] were late getting into the financial comparison marketplace, one which MoneySupermarket has capitalised on [...]

Jul

16

Moneysupermarket - The IPO

The History

The Facts

The Debate

Further Information

Comments

Recently Written

Categories

Archives

External Resources

Search