According to reports from Bloomberg, Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) is interested in acquiring Dubai-based online retailer Souq.com.
Talks originally centered around the Seattle-based tech giant taking an ownership stake of approximately 30%. This quickly expanded to talks of acquiring the whole company for a price tag somewhere around $1 billion. Sources were quick to point out discussions are still only preliminary in nature, and could fall apart at any time.
Souq.com is actively seeking out at least a minority investor, hiring Goldman Sachs to find it a partner back in September. Current institutional investors Tiger Global Management and Naspers Ltd. are reportedly weighing any potential sale as a chance to sell their stakes in the e-commerce site.
Souq.com is active in the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, selling about 1.5 million products across 31 different categories. As a privately held company, we don’t know much about its financial details, but it does call itself the largest online retail and marketplace platform in the Arab world. If Amazon wanted to make a splash in the Middle East, buying Souq would be a good start.
Amazon is investing aggressively into international growth. It recently rolled out its Prime subscription service to customers in both China and India, and the company seems poised to really start investing heavily in Amazon Video, which would further intensify its rivalry with Netflix.
Amazon shares are virtually unchanged during Friday’s slow post-Thanksgiving trading, falling $0.05 each, a decline of 0.01%.
