Nekaj odlomkov iz daljšega članka v Bloomberg Businessweek o prodaji podjetja Outfit7 Kitajcem: Why Did a Chinese Peroxide Company Pay $1 Billion for a Talking Cat? – Bloomberg.
“Samo and Iza Login were Slovenian high school sweethearts who studied computer science in college and then decided, in 2009, to get into the business of apps. Steve Jobs had introduced the Apple App Store the year before, and it was easy to believe that an overnight fortune was just an eccentric idea away. With $250,000 they’d saved while working for local IT companies, the Logins—who legally changed their surname to sound techy—started a company called Outfit7. Alongside six friends, they set up an office in the capital, Ljubljana. …
Then, after six months of misfires, the Logins built a children’s game in which an animated cat, Talking Tom, repeats in a high-pitched helium squeak whatever is spoken into an iPhone’s microphone. If a user feeds Tom hot peppers, pets him under his chin, or flicks his stomach, he responds with belches, purrs, and groans. Samo says he was optimistic that kids would love it, but acknowledges that “the whole team had some doubts.” One feature, added later, requires Tom to make regular stops in the bathroom, where he ceremoniously relieves himself into the toilet. …
This, apparently, was what users were looking for. Talking Tom Cat was an instant hit, launching a franchise whose titles have reached No. 1 in more than 100 countries on the App Store. … Playing Talking Tom triggers an onslaught of advertising and in-game purchase offers, and Outfit7 earns more than $100 million a year. In early 2016 the Logins decided to cash out, hiring Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to find the most lucrative deal. … The industrialists were willing to match the Logins’ asking price of $1 billion and let their team maintain autonomy. Samo and Iza signed away their company—having never taken money from outside investors, their stake was worth about $600 million. …
In May the Logins came to London. Approaching a vegan restaurant, Iza is hard to miss in a bright pink coat and Dolce & Gabbana shoes decorated with yellow floral jewels. The two smile a lot, laugh at each other’s jokes, and slip into Slovene when they don’t want a reporter to understand what they’re saying.
Over spinach-coconut soup and eggplant tagine, Samo explains that Outfit7 was largely a means to an end. The two had a seven-year plan to build a business and cash out so they could focus on their concern about food scarcity. They could have put the plan on hold and continued expanding in hopes of getting an even bigger payday down the line, but they aren’t sentimental about saying goodbye to Talking Tom. “If we kept running the company, then it would have been a failure,” Samo says. “The greed would have won.”” (vir: Why Did a Chinese Peroxide Company Pay $1 Billion for a Talking Cat? – Bloomberg)
Zanimiv izbor, precej v stilu pogrošnih medijskih rubrik za promocijo podjetništva ali lifestyle. Predvsem navedeno nima prav veliko zveze z naslovom članka. Menim, da je prispevek zanimiv in vreden branja predvsem v tistih delih, ki pojasnjujejo logiko te kupčije. Lahko je tudi snov za razmišljanje o nedavni prodaji Fotone in o možnosti, da je dejanska finančna slika kitajskega kupca podobna Agrokorjevi. “Even by the opaque standards of Chinese mergers and acquisitions, the deal was a head-scratcher. It’s hard to see the synergies between a maker of chemical solvents and a digital cat perched over a toilet. And curiously, the buyer,… Beri dalje »