Contact: Scott Denne
Just days away from spinning off its PayPal division, eBay inks a deal to divest eBay Enterprise, its e-commerce software and services business, to a consortium of private equity (PE) firms for $925m. The Enterprise unit was formed through the 2011 acquisitions of fulfillment service GSI Commerce and e-commerce software vendor Magento, as well as a smattering of smaller software purchases.
The transaction is valued at 0.8x trailing revenue – a number that’s familiar to Sterling Partners, one of the PE firms leading the deal. Sterling snagged Innotrac, a similarly sized order fulfillment provider, in 2013 at a nearly identical multiple. It’s worth noting that eBay Enterprise comes with a broader software portfolio than Innotrac did. In addition to Sterling, Permira Funds, Longview Asset Management and Innotrac itself are also participating in the buyout.
Valuations of e-commerce software companies have been somewhat subdued in the M&A market lately. Google’s 2013 pickup of channel intelligence at just over 4x trailing revenue appears to be the recent high-water mark. Multiples on the public markets, however, tend to be more generous, with Demandware and the newly public Shopify garnering above 15x.
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