The parent of Canadian online auto marketplace AutoTrader has traded hands again.
German auto marketplace operator AutoScout24 GmbH, which is majority owned by private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, has acquired Trader Corp. from fellow private equity firm Thoma Bravo LLC. AutoScout said H&F would “make a meaningful incremental equity investment” in conjunction with the deal.
The purchase joins one of the largest online automotive marketplaces in continental Europe with Canada’s leading online automotive marketplaces, AutoTrader.ca and AutoHebdo.net. Trader’s English and French language sites draw 26 million monthly visits and feature more than 450,000 listings, while AutoScout has about 30 million monthly users and more than two million vehicle listings across Europe.
Trader’s predecessor company was founded in 1975 and originally known for its paper classified guides. The founding Francis family sold the company in 2005 to Yellow Pages Group for $436-million. Private equity firm Apax Partners bought Trader from Yellow Pages in 2011 for $745-million, then sold it five years later to Thoma Bravo for $1.575-billion.
Terms were not disclosed but Bloomberg reported in June that Thoma Bravo was looking into a sale of Trader that could value the Toronto company’s equity and debt at $4-billion. Under Thoma Bravo’s ownership, Trader had acquired other companies including Dealertrack and Collateral Management Solutions, which expanded the company’s reach into automotive finance and providing lien and registration and recovery services to Canadian lenders.
“This acquisition strengthens AutoScout24′s position as a leading global online automotive marketplace and will help accelerate the growth of both platforms,” Autoscout24 chief executive officer Peter Brooks-Johnson said in the press release.
Thoma is an active player in the Canadian technology scene. Its current investments include Waterloo-based digital investigations software company Magnet Forensics, Toronto-based Cority, a vendor of software used for environmental, health, safety and quality audits, and Circle Cardiovascular Imaging of Calgary. H&F, which has invested in the automotive classifieds business since 2014, is an investor in one of Canada’s largest privately held software firms, PointClickCare.
The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter. RBC Capital Markets and Deutsche Bank acted as merger and acquisitions advisers to AutoScout 24 while Goldman Sachs, BofA Securities and HSBC Securities advised Trader in the same capacity.