As the market for acquiring fledgling Internet companies heats up again (following the previous Intenet bubble) it's worth taking a look at all those acquisitions that didn't quite work out. For every acquisition that's successful there seems to be dozens that die.However, what is most interesting about this article is the repeated errors. Some of the largest firms in the world cannot learn from their competition - why don't they learn from others mistakes? Could this mean that recent acquisitions, such as YouTube by Google and Myspace, are destined for disaster?
Also how much money is being spent - in some cases not millions, but billions of dollars? It seems that only the Americans are making such huge mistakes. So in reverse order:
10. Hotmail - acquired by Microsoft for about $400 million
9. Skype - acquired by eBay for $2.6 billion.
8. MySimon - acquired by CNET in 1999 for $700 million.
7. BlueMountain.com - acquired by Excite@Home for $780 million
6. Lycos - acquired by Terra Networks for $4.6 billion.
5. Netscape - acquired by AOL for $4.2 billion.
4. GeoCities - acquired by Yahoo! for $3.56 billion.
3. Excite - acquired by @Home in 1999 for $6.7 billion.
2. AOL - merged with TimeWarner in 2000.
1. Broadcast.com - acquired by Yahoo! for $5 billion.
Full article at http://internet.seekingalpha.com/article/21041
3 comments:
I wonder if there is another explanation & that its something to do with the short-term being more important than the long-term. How many of these deals were greeted negatively by the investment community at the time? Was the early payback enough? How is it that many of the purchasers are still around and still healthy (or fairly healthy). I am not sure that we (i.e. all of us) yet have the right lens for looking at corporate strategy in the internet world. I am thinking .... thinking ....
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