Presentation Title
Your company information
is an Arab Internet services company, founded in Amman , Jordan known for being the first Arabic/English email service provider.. Maktoob today has more than 280 employees with offices in Amman, Dubai,Cairo, Riyadh and Kuwait.
On Aug 25, 2009, Yahoo Inc. announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Maktoob.com,thus turning Maktoob into Yahoo!'s official arm in the MENA region.
History
Maktoob was founded in 1998 by Samih Toukan and Hussam Khoury who were able to introduce a webmail service with Arabic support for emails when no other free email service had such support.
The initial flourish of Maktoob and its large user base led the company to create several services and content channels for Arab users, many of which were not found previously in Arabic format. Chatting, Greeting Cards, and simple content channels were upon the first to be developed internally. Since then, Maktoob diversified its services through both acquisitions and internal development to have close to 40 different channels and services.
The success of the Maktoob portal drove the company to start new online businesses. CashUwas founded to address the issue of electronic payments in the region, Souq.com as an auctions and marketplace Araby.com an Arabic Search engine; Maktoob Reasearch an online Research service and Sukar.com the first and biggest online private shopping club in the Middle East.
They also helped users who did not have Arabic keyboard or browsers that support Arabic to send and receive emails by using a virtual keyboard which was done in Java, and using Java applets that had better Arabic support.
Abraaj Capital acquisition In June 2005, the UAE-based private equity house Abraaj Capital purchased 40% of the company shares in a USD 5.2 million buyout deal. The rationale for such an acquisition (according to Abraaj's website) is that Maktoob has a large user base (claimed to be more than 4 million) and, according to marketing literature, "a dominant online payment option cashU and a strong brand name
. It has established the first Arab online auction site souq.com which will benefit from leveraging the large community network." So far, Maktoob has not revealed any net revenue figures, although claiming to make a profit for the past few years.In December 2007, Abraaj sold its share to Tiger Global Management with an Internal rate of return of 75%.
Yahoo! Maktoob Blog: Arabic Blog Service Yahoo! Maktoob As7ab Maktoob: The first Arabic Social Networking service Yahoo! Maktoob News:News Service Yahoo! Maktoob Research: the Arab world's largest online marketing research business[7]
Maktoob-owned sites and services
Yahoo! Maktoob Bentelhalal: Marriage portal Yahoo! Maktoob Travel: Arabic Community Travel Portal Yahoo! Maktoob Games: Casual Gaming with Arabic support
Vision & Mission
Maktoobs vision is to lead the Middle Eastern Internet world in providing innovative and leading edge community, communication, content and ecommerce services and solutions for the local and international markets. Maktoobs mission is to maintain and grow their position as the worlds leading Middle Eastern Internet portal by constantly offering their users a unique experience and by providing them with new services and products that encourage open communications and community building.
Revenue Model
According to data obtained by DubaiBeat.com, Maktoob's revenue has grown from $0.9 million in 2001 to $3.5 million in 2005. The community users, meanwhile, has grown from 1 million users in 2001 to 3.5 million users in 2004. As for the valuation, we can see Abraaj Capital, a Dubai-based private equity firm, has paid $5.2 million for %40 of the company, so valuing it at $13 million in January 2005.
Traffic Trend
Advertising
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Yahoo! Maktoob is the number one in the Middle East and North Africa for display advertising, with 40% market share. Online ad spend for the region is currently only 2% of total advertising spend for the entire region. By way of comparison, online spend in France is around 15% and in the UK its 25%. However, Bartz noted that the region is host to the fastest growing advertising market in the world, with average year-on-year growth in digital spending around 25-30%.
We envision the online ad market in MENA to reach at least 5-7% of the total ad market by 2015, said Bartz. And with our strong agency and client relationships along with our leadership in Science, Art, and Scale I am confident well be there to deliver the benefits.
