Detik.com, the first and most popular news website in Indonesia, has been acquired by Para Group. Well, rumor on the acquisition has already started spreading a couple of days ago, thanks to Rama and his team at DS.
Para Group is owned by Chairul Tanjung, one of top 150 richest Indonesians (24th to be exact, according to Globe Asia magazine) with over $900 million in wealth. He also owns a number of businesses, such as Bank Mega, Trans Corp, and Carrefour Indonesia. Para Group has been wanting to buy Detik since two years ago, but for some reasons it has been delayed until now.
According to Bisnis.com, the other investors in Detik (besides Detik itself) are Tiger Investment (39%) and Mitsui & Co (2%). They wanted to sell their shares in Detik as they hoped to use the money to expand their business elsewhere. Their dream has finally come true after two years.
With rumor stating that the acquisition sum could hit around $60 million, this could be one of the biggest acquisitions ever in the start-up scene in Indonesia (beside the Kaskus acquisition by GDP Ventures).
Detik.com was founded by Budiono Darsono and Abdul Rahman with 100 mil IDR (approximately $11,700), and has since become the largest news site and one of the top 10 mobile sites in the country. With this acquisition Detik will be put under Trans Corp’s wing.
It’s certainly a promising sign for other start-ups and internet companies in Indonesia to witness an acquisition of this scale. If things continue as we think they might, we could very well expect to see more of such news from Indonesia in the future.
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