Lycos Europe shareholders voted to liquidate the business at an extraordinary general meeting at a hotel in Amsterdam this morning. They also nodded through management's strategy to sell its domain registration business, shopping portal and Danish website as going concerns. Shareholders will get €50 million returned to them on December 19 - not a bad Christmas present, but the price per share of €0.1605 is vastly less than its opening high of about €24 in 2000.
The majority of the company was owned by Telefonica's Terra internet arm (32%), Bertelsmann (20%) and CEO Christoph Monn (12%), heir to Bertelsmann's throne.
Lycos Europe, which had been losing money and users for years, finally concluded last month that no-one was going to buy it, after starting a strategic review in April. During the sale process, Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) took Lycos Europe to court in its native Netherlands, complaining the CEO had not explored all the options for the sell-off. About 500 of 700 staff are now losing their jobs. Lycos is based in Germany and Holland and has a UK ad sales team, which it's thought also sells for sites including IMDB and About.com, but the Lycos UK content operations are outsourced to a third-party here. Release.
More at our Lycos Europe channel
Lycos Europe has always been a separate company to America's Lycos Inc, but both sites have suffered since they were the web's most-visited back in the portal hey-days of 1999. The US company has changed hands twice since then and the European venture has failed to capitalise on the online ads boom - though it still trumpets recent product releases like Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Answers clone Lycos iQ, it had been losing money at a particularly chronic rate in the last two years. Emblematic of the state of affairs, Lycos Europe last year paid Lycos Inc $5.2m to renew its license to use the brand name, while entering the US itself under a completely different name, Jubii.
The company started a strategic review in April but, though Mohn suggested AOL (NYSE: TWX) and German ad net Tomorrow Focus were keen to bid around €200m, it's clear the sale process was flailing.
One option may have been to reunite the disparate Lycos regions - we received word anonymously in August that one suitor was teaming with Lycos Inc's Korean owner for a bid, but the banks were said to have walked away, citing the company's poor performance and unrealistic target of turning a profit by 2011. The last prices we heard being talked about were €100 to €150m.
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