Scout24 AG

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Scout24 AG

logo
legal form Corporation
ISIN DE000A12DM80
founding 1998
Seat Munich , GermanyGermanyGermany 
management
  • Tobias Hartmann
    Dirk Schmelzer
    Thomas Schroeter
    Ralf Weitz
Number of employees 1,538
sales 613 million euros (2019)
Branch Online marketplaces
Website www.scout24.com
As of May 4, 2020

Logo until 2019

Scout24 , based in Munich, is a listed operator of online marketplaces in several industries, including ImmoScout24. The Scout24 Group was active in 18 countries in 2019 and employed a total of 1,538 people. The ImmoScout24 multiplatform was used by around 13.5 million visitors a month in Germany in 2019 .

The company's share has been listed in the MDAX since June 18, 2018 .

history

Scout24 headquarters at Leuchtenbergring in Munich

Scout24 was founded in 1998 by the internet entrepreneur Joachim Schoss with the financing a. a. founded by the entrepreneur Otto Beisheim . In 2004, the then subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom , T-Online, acquired Scout24 from Beisheim Holding. As a result of the merger of T-Online International with Deutsche Telekom, Scout24 was a direct subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom from June 2006.

In 2011, Telekom sold the Scout24 Group's job exchange, JobScout24, to CareerBuilder.

In mid-2013, Deutsche Telekom announced the sale of the Scout24 Group. Potential buyers were the investment companies EQT , Silver Lake and Hellman & Friedman . On November 21, 2013, Telekom announced that it had sold 70 percent of its shares in Scout24 to Hellman & Friedman for 1.5 billion euros. From then on, Telekom only held 30% of the shares.

On September 7, 2015, Scout24 announced its IPO on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange . A total of around 29.5 million shares are to be placed with an offer volume of 899 million euros. After the IPO, Hellman & Friedman will hold 49% and Deutsche Telekom 14% of the shares. The remaining stake should be in free float. The first day of trading on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange was October 1, 2015. In September 2016 Hellman & Friedman sold all of its shares in Scout24. In June 2018, the Scout24 share was added to the MDAX of Deutsche Börse. The Finanzcheck.de portal was taken over in July 2018 .

On February 15, 2019, the Scout Group accepted a takeover offer for around 5.7 billion euros from the company Pulver BidCo GmbH, behind which the financial investors Blackstone Group and Hellmann & Friedmann stand. The takeover failed when only 42.8% of the shareholders gave their consent to the takeover by May 14, 2019, so the minimum approval rate of 50% was not achieved. The financial investor Blackrock is also involved in Scout24.

In December 2019 it was announced that Hellmann & Friedman would take over the AutoScout24, FinanceScout24 and Finanzcheck marketplaces for 2.9 billion euros from Scout24 in the first half of 2020.

Corporate governance

Board Supervisory board
  • Tobias Hartmann, CEO
  • Dirk Schmelzer, CFO
  • Thomas Schroeter, CPO
  • Ralf Weitz, Chief Commercial Officer

Scout24 marketplaces

Scout24 operates the ImmoScout24 marketplace.

ImmoScout24

Logo from 2020

ImmoScout24 (for Austria: Immobilien.net ) is an online portal for real estate providers, owners, tenants and buyers. The platform receives around 13.5 million visitors per month. At the end of 2019, 425,000 real estate advertisements were placed on ImmoScout24. The company, based in Berlin, employs around 800 people.

In December 2011, hackers gained access to ImmobilienScout24's servers and thus to address and contact data, customer numbers and names of both commercial and private providers.

In November 2019 Scout24 announced that the site would be renamed ImmoScout24 in 2020 as part of the redesign.

More marketplaces that have been discontinued or sold

TruckScout24

TruckScout24 logo

TruckScout24 was taken over by the Machineseeker Group at the beginning of 2019. There are over 100,000 commercial vehicles in the TruckScout24 database. In addition to Germany, the service is also operated in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Austria, France, Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

ElectronicScout24

ElectronicScout24 logo

ElectronicScout24 was created in October 2005 and was a price search engine for consumer electronics , telecommunications , computers and household appliances . It was reinstated in December 2012.

FriendScout24

FriendScout24 logo

FriendScout24 is a dating agency. According to its own information, it has more than 10 million member profiles across Europe. In Europe, the service is offered in Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands. We are looking for life, travel and leisure partners. FriendScout24 emerged from the privately initiated partner exchange peopleunited.de (operated by People United GmbH, which was founded in 1996 and dissolved in 2001).

After the majority of the Scout24-Holding was taken over by the private equity company Hellman & Friedman at the end of 2013, Friendscout24 has been up for sale ever since. The US dating company Match.com, represented in Germany - through the Meetic Group - with Neu.de on the single market, took over FriendScout in 2014 for a single-digit million amount.

JobScout24

JobScout24 logo

JobScout24 is an online job exchange. In 2015, 2.1 million users visited the site every month, on which more than 250,000 job offers are available to them. The portal was sold to CareerBuilder on September 13, 2011 . The data of the registered users stored in the personal profiles were also transferred to servers in the USA, which should, however, comply with the Safe Harbor guidelines.

TravelScout24

TravelScout24 logo

This subsidiary is now run by an external operator, Triplemind GmbH from Offenbach. TravelScout24 continues to appear under the Scout24 logo and is integrated into the Scout24 landscape.

AutoScout24

Autoscout24 logo

AutoScout24 is a European car portal. In December 2019, AutoScout 24 was taken over by the American private equity company Hellman & Friedman together with FinanceScout24 and Finanzcheck.de for 2.9 billion euros .

FinanceScout24

FinanceScout24 Logo 2020.svg

FinanceScout24 operates a finance portal on the Internet and offers its users the comparison and online purchase of insurance, pension products, construction finance, installment loans, investment products, and electricity, gas and telecommunications tariffs. In December 2019 FinanceScout24 was taken over by the American private equity company Hellman & Friedman together with AutoScout24 and Finanzcheck.de for 2.9 billion euros .

MotoScout24

MotoScout24 - special market for trading motorcycles on the Internet - was a service provided by AutoScout24 GmbH. Over 36,000 motorcycles were offered for sale on MotoScout24.

Local24

Local24 was a portal for free classified ads on the Internet. It contained around 200,000 classified ads from all areas, including automobiles, animals, job vacancies, and others. For regional searches, corresponding advertisements were determined and displayed via a crawler. The portal had over 400 search categories. Local24 has been taken offline since 2018.

Conflicts with other domain owners

Scout24 International Management AG, based in Switzerland, warned numerous owners of domains with “Scout” in their name and claimed that the sole term “Scout” without the addition “24” was trademarked. However, “Scout” is not registered as a trademark, and at the end of 2012 the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) rejected a request from Scout24 International Management AG directed against owners of similar domains.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ scout24.com: Board of Directors
  2. ↑ Supervisory Board
  3. ↑ a b c Scout24 Sustainability Report 2019 , accessed April 14, 2020
  4. ↑ a b c Scout24 Annual Report 2019 , accessed April 14, 2020
  5. ^ Founder of Scout24: The two lives of Joachim Schoss . Augsberger General. October 28, 2013. Retrieved January 24, 2015.
  6. ↑ history . Website Scout24 Holding GmbH, www.scout24.com. Retrieved May 26, 2010
  7. ↑ Reuters: Telekom surprisingly sells job site to US rivals. In: handelsblatt.com . September 14, 2011, accessed February 14, 2015 .
  8. ↑ N24.de: Countdown for the sale of Scout24 is running. September 24, 2013, accessed November 15, 2013 .
  9. ↑ Handelsblatt: Telekom is negotiating with three bidders for Scout24. November 4, 2013, accessed November 15, 2013 .
  10. ↑ Manager Magazin: Scout sale brings in 1.5 billion euros. November 21, 2013. Retrieved November 22, 2013 .
  11. ↑ Scout24 AG: Scout24 sets the price range between EUR 26.5 and EUR 33.0 per share. In: dgap.de. Retrieved March 26, 2019 .
  12. ↑ finanzen.net GmbH: Scout24, Delivery Hero and Puma from today in the MDax. In: boerse-online.de. June 18, 2018, accessed September 5, 2018 .
  13. ↑ Scout24 buys comparison portal Finanzcheck.de for 285 million euros. Retrieved March 26, 2019 .
  14. ↑ Internet Industry : Back to the Ex - What the Scout24 takeover says about private equity. Retrieved February 18, 2019 .
  15. ↑ Scout24: Investors fail with takeover offer. Retrieved May 14, 2019 .
  16. ^ Börsennews.de: DGAP voting rights: Scout24 AG (German). Retrieved September 3, 2019 .
  17. ↑ FOCUS Online: Scout24 remains on a growth path - share gives way. February 19, 2020, accessed March 4, 2020 .
  18. ↑ Comparison portals : Investor buys AutoScout24 and Finanzcheck for 2.9 billion euros . In: Spiegel Online . December 17, 2019 ( spiegel.de [accessed December 18, 2019]).
  19. ↑ Xparo: Scout24 - Board. Retrieved February 17, 2020 .
  20. ↑ Scout24 - Supervisory Board. Retrieved February 17, 2020 .
  21. ↑ Scout24 Fact Sheet ( Memento from August 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive ). Website Scout24 Holding GmbH, scout24.com. Retrieved May 26, 2010
  22. ↑ Hacker attack on real estate scout 24 . In: Stuttgarter Zeitung online, December 12, 2011. Accessed December 23, 2011.
  23. ↑ Scout24: New brand identity for ImmoScout24 and AutoScout24. In: Scout24. November 28, 2019, accessed December 4, 2019 .
  24. ↑ #EXCLUSIVE Machineseeker takes over TruckScout24. In: deutsche-startups.de. May 7, 2019, accessed on May 16, 2019 (German).
  25. ↑ ElectronicScout24 website. Retrieved December 8, 2012
  26. ↑ Company portrait . Website FriendScout24, friendscout24.de. Retrieved on June 3, 2010 ( Memento from August 1, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  27. ↑ Friendscout24 is sold to the owners of Neu.de. Retrieved January 9, 2020 .
  28. ↑ Media data
  29. ↑ CareerBuilder merges with JobScout24. In: wallstreet-online.de. September 13, 2011, accessed February 14, 2015 .
  30. ↑ facts. Retrieved March 26, 2019 .
  31. ↑ a b DER SPIEGEL: Investor buys AutoScout24 and Finanzcheck for 2.9 billion euros - DER SPIEGEL - Wirtschaft. Retrieved January 23, 2020 .
  32. ↑ Markenmazin.de . Markenmagazin.de website.Retrieved June 18, 2011
  33. ↑ WIPO Domain Name Decision: DCH2012-0016. Accessed March 26, 2019 .

Coordinates: 48 ° 7 ′ 57.6 ″  N , 11 ° 36 ′ 53 ″  E