News Corp, owned by Rupert Murdoch, bought a minority share in the Indian property website PropTiger.com, as the first deal to come in an acquisition-spree in Indias developing e-commerce sector.
“We see a big digital opportunity in India, where digital use is booming and demographics are favourable, and this is the first stage of that” said Raju Narisetti, senior vice-president for strategy at News Corp. “I would look at it as the beginning of several things we would do in the future.”
Under the deal valued at $30 million News Corp acquired 25% in the parent company of the website, Elara Technologies, which supplies information about Indias fast developing residential property market that is expected to increase to $158 billion by 2020.
PropTiger.com is the latest addition to News Corps portfolio of websites. In September the company acquired Move Inc, owner of Realtor.com, which operates in the US. News Corp has a share in iProperty, which manages listings in south east Asia and it also holds a majority stake in Australia’s realestate.com.au.
“We believe the site will be the most important platform for developers seeking to market new properties and the most trusted and reliable source for purchasers, many of whom will be buying for the first time” News Corps CEO Robert Thomson said.
Analysts believe that Indias e-commerce segment, with 300 million and increasing online users, will mirror performance shown by Chinese companies like Alibaba and Baidu.
A lot of new companies are challenging local brokers, which dominate the segment and provide misleading and insufficient information online, for their share of the home-buying market.
Earlier this month Japans SoftBank reported it had invested $100 million in Housing.com, yet another start-up company.
“News Corp and PropTiger.com have a shared vision to use technology, high quality data and rich content to bring transparency and simplicity to the home buying experience and to help consumers make well informed decisions,” said Dhruv Agarwala, co-founder of PropTiger.com.
News Corp gained 1.91% on Monday and closed at $15.46 on the NASDAQ. On Tuesday the stock climbed 0.10% to trade at 15.47 GMT, marking a one-year decrease of 11.47%. The company is valued at $8.89 billion. According to the Financial Times, the 8 analysts offering 12-month price targets for News Corp have a median target of $18.00, with a high estimate of $21.00 and a low estimate of $16.70. The median estimate represents a $16.43% increase from the last price of $15.46.
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