Gocompare share price rises after splashing £36.5m of its spondoolicks on voucher code website MyVoucherCodes
Price comparison website Gocompare today snapped up online voucher code website MyVoucherCodes for £36.5m.
Gocompare is hoping the acquisition will be transformational by attracting customers on a daily rather than annual basis.
Boss Matthew Crummack said MyVoucherCodes would play a “valuable role [in the firm’s] ambition to become the ‘go-to’ place for savvy savers to find great deals, and for service providers to reach and acquire customers”.
The deal caps a long sales process for digital payments firm Monetise, which saw a sale to Markco Media fall through in May 2016.
Read more: Monitise’s shares soar on MyVoucherCodes disposal talks
“We have hundreds of suppliers on one side providing us with information. And we have millions of customers on the others side. What we do in the middle is write software to put the two together,” Crummack told City A.M..
“MyVoucherCodes connects thousands of retailers, which are looking for incremental sales and connects them to millions of consumers on the other side.”
He continued:
Up until today, our frequency of communication with our customer base, which is very sizeable, was mostly annual because people only renew their insurance policies annually. But with MyVoucherCode you have people interacting with this business weekly, monthly or daily,
Launched in November 2006 MyVoucherCodes is one of the UK’s biggest discount voucher websites. The sale transaction represents a chunky ratio of nearly nine times annual earnings – meaning Gocompare would need to weight nine years to get their original investment back if MyVoucherCodes’ bottom line remained static.
However, as part of the deal, banking facilities have been updated in preparation for growth. MyVoucherCodes’ revolving credit facility, similar to a corporate overdraft, has been increased from £10m to £40m by its lenders.
Shares in London-listed Gocompare jumped 4.4 per cent in trading, ending the day at 103.63p.
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