Lycos Europe to Sell, Close Assets

• By Justin Lee, November 26, 2008

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November 26, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Web solutions provider Lycos Europe (www.lycos-europe.com) announced on Wednesday it plans to sell some of its assets and close the rest, including its web hosting service,�after it failed to secure an investor,�following struggles to compete with search engine giants like Google and Yahoo.

The company, which provides search, web hosting, email, social networking, online shopping tools and domain names registration services, reported a net loss of 17.1 million euros in the first nine months of 2008 on sales of 46.9 million euros.

In May, Lycos Europe CEO Christoph Mohn said he saw the company as an attractive target for a US or Asian buyer.

In the past few months, Lycos, along with its advisors, have evaluated all possible options for the business, including the sale of the company as a whole, a sale of all or parts of its assets, restructuring and partial liquidation of the business.

After reviewing all of these options, Lycos' management and supervisory boards decided that it would work towards selling off its domains, Danish portal and online shopping tools divisions, while discontinuing its portal and web hosting divisions.

Lyco also plans to distribute 50 million euros in 2008 to its shareholders. As of the end of September Lycos Europe had 694 employees, which nearly two-thirds of whom were employed in Germany.

The strategic plan still needs to be approved at the upcoming December 12 shareholder meeting in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The company is a joint venture of German media group Bertelsmann and Spanish telecommunications provider Telefonica, while the rest of the US-based Lycos (www.lycos.com), which is still one of the world's top Internet portals, is owned by South Korean Internet company Daum Communications (www.daum.net).

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