The Internet travel booking company Priceline announced today it will acquire the online restaurant reservation service OpenTable for $103 a share. The all-cash deal will cost Priceline a total of $2.6 billion.
The deal is expected to officially close sometime in the third quarter of 2014. When that happens, OpenTable will be run as an independent business within the Priceline Group. OpenTable will continue to be based in San Francisco and lead by its current management team.
Darren Huston, the President and CEO of The Priceline Group, stated today:
"OpenTable is a great match for The Priceline Group. They provide us with a natural extension into restaurant marketing services and a wonderful and highly-valued booking experience for our global customers. We look forward to helping the OpenTable team accelerate their global expansion, increase the value offered to their restaurant partners, and enhance the end-to-end experience for our collective customers across desktop and mobile devices.!
Formed in 1998, OpenTable allows its users to reserve seats at over 31,000 restaurants in the U.S, Canada, Mexico, the UK, France, Germany and Japan. The company says it has seated over 125 million people in those restaurants since launching its first mobile apps in 2008.
Source: Priceline
Reader comments
Priceline tapping into restaurant bookings with $2.6 billion acquisition of OpenTable
That's an insane amount of money for OpenTable!
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good for them, open table is a good app
can't believe open table is worth 2.6bil when BB was 4Bil
Reminds me of the 2000 dot com boom where people were over valuating all those companies. How did that end up working out??
Posted via CB10
What android phone is that?
I downloaded Open Table..thought it would work on the Q10. No luck. Dangit!
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Really? I just used it this week, to make reservations. Maybe I used the website and not the app I'll have to check.
I've not had any problems at all with it, I use it quite often.
Use it on my Z10 all the time. No problem.
From my Neutrino Powered Z10
Priceline works excellently! I have used it so many times in my travels, and the z10 runs it with no issues whatsoever.
Posted via CB10
Had no idea that what seems to be such a small simple site could be worth so much. It's not like it's mainstream. I think more ppl know what a Q10 is than they do what OpenTable is lol.
Q10SQN100-1/10.2.1.3175 CB10'n
I agree!
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Nope, only BlackBerry users know what a q10 is...lol
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+1
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The world has gone insane.
2600 million dollars for OpenTable.
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Too much
Slicing using my
I hope they bring in a native open table app
Beproud - BlackBerry 10
The stats don't add up for that kind of a purchase price. You would think between 600 to 700 million would be more than reasonable.
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A company that is not profiting (formerly bankrupt) paying exorbitantly high sums to acquire a company that is not profiting will fail in the long run.
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I'm confused.. I use Opentable on a Q10 all the time to book restaurants... does this not work for others? I'm also running the Blackberry World version not an android apk.
Love Open Table! I hope they don't screw it up!
From my Neutrino Powered Z10
The only way that purchase makes sense is if the parent company of priceline is going to receive a large tax deduction for an expense, that ostensibly is related to their regular business.
And that means all that tax revenue is going to a company that could make their own version for a small fraction of the price.
That is less money for our military, roads, schools, medicare, safety, border patrol...
All of the value provided by open table is already done by AAA manuals...
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Tax losses carry forward and are transferable in takeovers and are saleable as assets, but only against future profits, until they are used up. So, the incentive remains to take investment risk. As far as tax laws go this one makes sense, unlike many others.
From my Neutrino Powered Z10
In the last few years, more and more restaurants have started to move their reservations systems over to OpenTable. I primarily use it whenever I go to Las Vegas (I've used it here in Atlanta once, and mainly because I earned 1000 points on that meal.) and even last minute it's pretty easy to get a table at a good number of restaurants out there that use OpenTable.
Priceline has been on a buying spree as of late, as last year they acquired Kayak. Some are saying that Priceline's offer for OpenTable is too low......
Infrastructure for the future is shaped and bought NOW. The Internet Age has only just begun, realistically....
Hence all those seemingly crazy acquisitions and prices recently, like the $16b from FB for WhatsApp.
Hope BlackBerry has a future in it, and privacy and security too.
"No Q10?" -> "Buy from Chen... "
Priceline is still around?
The Zombie Apocalypse is upon us. Run while you still can
Cc
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Very very expensive
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