Japan’s Recruit Holdings to acquire German restaurant booking site Quandoo for $219M

Recruit Holdings, the Japanese conglomerate best known for its eponymous online job hunting site, announced today it will acquire German restaurant booking site Quandoo for JPY26.5 billion (about US$251 million).

Back in October, Recruit purchased a seven percent stake in the Quandoo. The acquisition will see Recruit purchase the remainder of the shares in their entirety.

While Recruit technically is not a startup, in the past few decades the company has built out a sizeable online media presence around its classifieds pages and recruitment network, which extends both online and offline. Last October, the firm listed on the Tokyo stock exchange, raising JPY 197 billion (about US$1.9 billion) upon its debut on the market. The company publicly stated it would embark on a global acquisition spree following the listing.

Over the past two years, Recruit has acquired several recruitment firms job-hunting sites around the world, including Indeed in the US, NuGrid in India, and Peoplebank in Australia. But the company has also placed bets on other verticals. Under its venture investment arm, it has doled out funding to Blacklane, the Uber-esque ridehailing startup that’s active in Japan; Wongnai, a Thailand-based restaurant listings site; Snapdeal, India’s fast-growing ecommerce site, and several firms on both sides of the globe. The firm also recently launched a US$20 million fund to invest in HR-related technology startups, and a US$50 million dollar fund for IT startups.

Quandoo may become a future partner of Recruit’s AirRegi product – a point of sale service that just had a world wide rollout. Domestically, AirRegi also has a seat reservation management system, but internationally it does not. Recruit might see Quandoo’s presence in 11 countries in Europe and the Middle East as a means to boost AirRegi’s profile down the road.

Editing by David Corbin, top image by peoplezchronicles