Yahoo! is selling price-comparison site Kelkoo to UK private equity firm Jamplant, Kelkoo founder Pierre Chappaz says in a blog post. Chappaz would not reveal the value of the transaction but insiders quoted by TechCrunch say Jamplant is paying slightly less than EUR100m (USD125.8m) for Kelkoo.
Yahoo! bought Kelkoo for EUR475m (USD597.7m) in 2004. The French-based site has steadily lost visitors in the past year and a half, as competition in the price-comparison market intensified. Chappaz, who founded Kelkoo in 1999 but has since left the company, blames Yahoo!'s management for Kelkoo's misfortunes.
"Yahoo!'s sale of Kelkoo, after the knocks and bruises of Overture (see the failed agreement with Google Adwords), illustrates [Yahoo!'s] incapacity to develop within the transactional sphere," says Chappaz in the blog post. "It's a cultural problem: Yahoo! operates in the world of traditional CPM [cost per thousand]. It should also be said that Yahoo!'s management has not demonstrated a great ability to manage businesses outside the American border."
The news comes as Yahoo! continues to lose stock value, after a brief rise last week following the much anticipated resignation of CEO Jerry Jang. Shares in Yahoo! have lost 48% of their value in the past 90 days. The company currently has a market cap of USD13bn.
