GoNabit: Going Public?!

GoNabit: Going Public?!

Or so an exclusive from The National would have us believe…

July 3, 2011 4:53 by Eva Fernandes

Well, well, well. Looks like homegrown GoNabit is going public. OK, it is not as sensational as we make it seem, as not much details of the deal have been released. But what we’ve heard is that LivingSocial has been in talks with Barclays, JPMorgan Chase and Allen & Co to raise about $1 billion in an initial public offering.

Of course, there is a certain amount of truth to our rumblings. As you would know dear reader, LivingSocial, a popular daily deal website, bought GoNabit last week for an undisclosed amount. LivingSocial which is one of the major players in the US group-buying market has been on a bit of acquisition spree. In the recent past it has acquired Ensogo, a deal site in Thailand and the Philippines, and DealKeren, an Ensogo company based in Indonesia. It has also launched operations in the Netherlands.

Although not much is known about the deal, The National did say it was a special exclusive where their sources say, the on-going talks value the company at $10-$15 billion. So to answer Kipp’s earlier question, “Was it the Right Time to ‘Nab It?” With an IPO on the way, the timing almost doesn’t matter. Kipp’s sure it’s not coincidence that news of the IPO and the acquisition came right on top of each other. It’s all part of the grand scheme that LivingSocial and GoNabit has been cooking up.

What’ll be interesting to see is how successful that IPO will be, packaged with LivingSocial’s other groupbuying sites around the world; as well as what GoNabit’s regional competitors are doing to play catch up to GoNabit’s ‘Hulk-style’ strategy—bulking up and covered in green before our very eyes.