We’re hearing from two separate sources that Nasza Klasa, the largest Polish social networking platform, is on the block for €130 million.
Launched in November 2006, at its height the service had over 27 million registered users. But figures have been nose-diving this year as Facebook eats into its core social networking user base. It may be that heat from Facebook which is prompting the sale. We’ve reached out to Nasza Klasa for comment.
The American investment fund Tiger Global is the current owner of Nasza Klasa, however there is also a stake owned by Excolimp, based in Cyprus (frankly the ownership is byzantine). From January 2008, the Polish portal belonged to Forticom, an investment vehicle belonging to Digital Sky Technologies (DST), which acquired a 62% stake, but divested itself of the NK interest to focus on Russia.
Nasza Klasa is similar in concept to the American-based Classmates.com, allowing its users to register from particular schools and graduation years.
We understand that the M&A bank advising on the deal is London-based NOAH Advisors.
Update:
We have some new figures now to update this. It appears Facebook is on 3.3m users, 2.5m per day while NK is now on 21m registered users, 13.5m monthly unique users and 6.5m daily unique users. In other words it probably has a lot more registered than active users. It appears the domain change to nk.pl may have scewed it’s numbers down for a bit.
The company has also sent us a response: “Currently, the company is completely in the hands of private investors, which opens up new opportunities [our emphasis] for searching for partners interested in building long-term value of the portal and strengthening the position of NK. Not comment on valuations of the company presented in the media.”
(there are ceo’s of forticom behind – Vitaly Rubstein and Igor Slahov). With companies based on Cyprus, you never know, however, I asked Nk some time ago is there any connection between Tiger Global and Excolimp. And they say, there are no connections at all. Perhaps they were not true, but the statement was firm.
I’d like to know if you know that from your sources – that TG is the current owner of Nasza-klasa?
However, it’s clear Facebook is gaining on the site.
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