E-mail provider Crayfish Co., Ltd. Friday grabbed a 47 percent stake in
Intranets K.K., the Japanese arm of popular free intranet provider
Intranets.com.
The deal is worth 600 million yen. Crayfish will purchase
1,500 ordinary shares currently owned by Hikari Tsushin and 2,500 ordinary
shares that will be newly issued by Intranets Japan. The purchase price of
an ordinary share of Intranets
Japan in both transactions will be 150,000 yen.
The transaction is expected to close by December 25, 2000 without any
foreseeable material impacts on Crayfish’s current fiscal year financials.
Crayfish, which plans to send a board member for Intranets Japan, will also
lend its e-mail service to Intranets K.K. under an alliance.
Intranets Japan provides free intranet functions, including a Web-based
scheduler and file sharing to approximately 150,000 subscribers. The portal
generates revenues from advertisement fees for banners on its pages and
advertisements in e-mail sent to subscribers.
It also expects paid e-mail and related services to become another source of
revenue, which is where Crayfish comes in. Crayfish will license its
proprietary “Crayfish 2000” hosting services to Intranets Japan. Furthermore
under the alliance, Crayfish will offer Intranets
Japan’s proprietary business collaboration service to approximately 53,000
of its subscribers.
Isao Matsushima, president and chief executive officer of Crayfish, said the
deal makes sense because both firms cater to the same market segment —
small- and medium-sized businesses.
Hideki Wachi, president and CEO of Intranets Japan, agreed.
“We firmly believe that we can maximize the synergetic effect between
Crayfish and us by complementing each other’s service lineup, including
provision of our proprietary intranets solutions to Crayfish,” Wachi said.
