Private equity firms add Polish auction site to their basket for £2.7bn
A consortium of private equity companies has announced the acquisition of Polish auction website Allegro.
Cinven, Permira and Mid Europa this afternoon unveiled a $3.25bn (£2.66bn) deal to buy the company from South Africa's Naspers Limited.
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Allegro, described as Poland’s eBay, was founded in 1999 and has more than 20m registered users carrying out 14m transactions a month.
The group, which operates from Poznan and employs 1,275, also operates price comparison platform Ceneo.
“Allegro is a great business. It is a clear market leader and extremely well positioned to benefit from structural e-commerce drivers with a strong technology platform and strong reputation with its users,” said Cinven partner David Barker.
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“We are very excited to be working with management to drive the business growth and we are looking forward to working alongside Permira and Mid Europa.”
Reuters reported in July that Chinese e-commerce group Alibaba, eBay and private equity firm CVC Capital Partners were among the bidders for the company.