Microsoft to buy price comparison website

Microsoft is to buy Ciao, an online price comparison and product reviews site, as it seeks to improve its European search offering.

• Greenfield Online, Ciao’s parent company, has agreed a $486m deal to be bought by Microsoft. Greenfield, which is listed on Nasdaq and gains most of its revenues from its internet surveying business, had previously agreed a takeover bid from Quadrangle Group, a private equity firm focused on media and technology, priced at $15.50 a share.
• It announced the termination of the Quadrangle agreement earlier this week but failed to reveal the identity of the new buyer.
• The offer, which is worth $17.50 per Greenfield share, represents a small premium to the US group’s closing share price on Thursday and represents just over three times last year’s revenues of $153m.
• Microsoft said it has agreed to sell Greenfield’s online research business, but did not reveal a price or the purchaser.
• John Mangelaars, Microsoft’s vice president for consumer and online in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said Ciao would improve the commercial search experience and add around 100 developers to its European operations. Ciao has 26m users, according to Comscore, and 5m user reviews, and links to 2,200 online merchant partners. It has offices in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
• Mr Mangelaars said that Ciao’s pricing and product information would be added into MSN search results for terms in categories such as electronics, travel and cars.
• “We are investing heavily in EMEA because we see this as an interesting market for us and an opportunity to provide better services to consumers,” he said. “By adding services like price comparison, they will spend more time on our network and come to use it more often.”
• Ciao pages appearing in other search engine results will also serve to attract users of rival services to MSN, which has 150m users in EMEA, he said.
• The deal follows the acquisitions of Multimap, a UK online mapping company, and the launch of “cashback” search in the US. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter.