October 03, 2011

Groupon re-names its Indian daily deals company

groupon_web.jpg

 

Groupon has announced this morning that it rebranded its Indian discount deals company SoSasta.com that it acquired earlier this year to Crazeal.com. This name change most likely comes due to the domain Groupon.in being picked up by some Indian company.

 

Groupon’s Indian Crazeal.com is currently in beta launch, and is planned to partner with local merchants in 11 cities Ahmadabad, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata, Mumbai, Nagpur and Pune.

 

Groupon has also announced who will be taking charge of Crazeal.com, where they named Ankur Warikoo (Co-Founded Accentium Web and served as Entreprenuer in Residence at Rocket Internet) as CEO to be responsible for expanding the business of Crazeal.com on behalf of Groupon in India. Bharath Devanathan (served at Yahoo and Booz company) was also appointed as COO. Also Sachin Kapur (formerly at BigRock and InfoEdge India) as appointed as Head of Marketing.

 

Groupon offers its deals in 35 countries, and gets much of its sales from outside the U.S. Management’s ability to promote growth abroad could help set it apart from rivals like LivingSocial, which in December said it received a $183 million investment led by Amazon.com Inc.

 

However, speaking of a potential hot IPO, on September 24th The Wall Street Journal reported that what was expected to be one of the hottest stock offerings of the year fell into deeper turmoil the previous Friday, as daily deals pioneer Groupon Inc. said it was cutting its reported revenue in half, and its No. 2 executive Margo Giorgiadis left the company and is returning back to Google as a senior executive, only five months after she was hired away.

 

Regulators have been scrutinizing Groupon's accounting since it filed for an initial public offering that could value the Chicago Company at $20 billion.

 

Groupon said it would change what it books as revenue after discussions with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It will now only count as revenue its commission on sales, rather than the total value of an online coupon. Previously, when it sold a restaurant gift certificate for $10, for instance, it would book the full amount, even though a portion went to the business owner. That change reduces Groupon's stated revenue for 2010 to $312.9 million, down from the $713.4 million previously reported.

 

The company has pulled back on plans to go public. It is still evaluating its options on a week-by-week basis!

Updated: October 03, 2011 1:29 PM

Comments

    WRITE A COMMENT


  1. To comment you have to sign in

© 2011 techegypt.com, All rights reserved.

Privacy Policy | Terms Of Use | RSS Feed | Contact Us