Marc Simoncini, chairman of Meetic, is planning on taking the company public in the fall. Marc sent me some of the French press release, which I’ve run through Google Translate. Marc made sure to personally translate that they are shooting for a $300-450M USD valuation.
PARIS, April 8 (Reuters) – the site of meetings on Internet Meetic envisages to at least put a quarter of its capital out of Stock Exchange, for raising between 50 and 75 million euros, reads one Friday in the daily newspaper the Echoes. Marc Simoncini, chairman of Meetic, quoted in the financial daily newspaper, plans to conclude this operation between September 15 and next 15 October. The financial establishments selected develop the company, which counts 11 million registered Net surfers, between 200 and 300 million euros. Meetic intends to carry out this year a sales turnover ranging between 40 and 50 million euros, is the double of that of 2004, for a rough surplus of exploitation from 8 to 10 million.
Paris-based analyst Olivier Beauvillain of consultancy Jupiter Research predicts revenues of the leading European dating Web sites will more than double over the next five years, from $200 million to $450 million. Meetic will book around $55 million in sales this year.
More details from TheDeal:
Meetic, owned by Ilius SA of Boulogne-Billancourt, has raised $8.7 million in its first round of venture capital financing from Paris-based AGF Private Equity, owned by Allianz AG of Munich, in October 2004. The investment gives AGF a minority stake in the profitable Internet business, Simoncini, the French entrepreneur who sold his last online venture to Vivendi Universal SA four years ago for €274 million. CEO Simoncini told French news site Le Journal du Net that he maintains 80% of meetic.fr after this round. The startup will use the new funds to expand in the coming year into six new countries in Asia and boost its marketing in Europe. The multilingual site has about 1 million paying subscribers in France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K. The company posted net profit of €4.5 million on sales of €16 million in 2003.
Click here to view all ODI posts on Meetic.
[UPDATE: Meetic is not supposed to communicate figures about our IPO before the IPO. Reuters wrote the article without any confirmation from Meetic.]
From Marc:
What I can confirm is: we plan an IPO for S2 2005. Meetic, owned by Ilius SA of Boulogne-Billancourt, has raised $8.7 million in its first round of venture capital financing from Paris-based AGF Private Equity, owned by Allianz AG of Munich, in October 2004. The investment gives AGF a minority stake in the profitable Internet business, Simoncini, the French entrepreneur who sold his last online venture to Vivendi Universal SA four years ago for €182 million. CEO Simoncini told French news site Le Journal du Net that he maintains more than 50% of meetic.fr after this round. The startup will use the new funds to expand in the coming year into six new countries in Asia and boost its marketing in Europe. The multilingual site has more than 1 million cumulated paying subscribers in 16 countries. The company posted EBITDA €4 million on sales of €22 million in 2004 (January to December) and plan €40/50 million of sales and €8/10 million of EBITDA.
