QXL.com Expands Into Belgium

[London, ENGLAND] European online auctioneer
QXL.com announced
Tuesday its expansion into Belgium with a new site,
www.qxl.be, available
in both French and Dutch languages.

QXL.com now has twelve sites in Europe, some of
them — like www.qxl.be — created by the parent company,
others acquired from local operators. All the sites
are interlinked so that users in one country can
bid for items in another.

Michiel van der Meer, who is managing director of
QXL.nl in the Netherlands is responsible for expanding
the company’s operations right across the Benelux
region. He was formerly on the management team of
online publisher Planet Internet, and later, managing
director of OZZ Interactive.

“The Netherlands, under Michiel’s direction, has proved
a very successful site and Belgium is a natural expansion
in this area. With this site, we are in an excellent
position to offer buyers and sellers across Europe access
to an unrivalled community of users,” said QXL.com Chief
Executive Jim Rose.

The latest move fills in one of the most obvious gaps in
QXL.com’s coverage of the European continent. It follows
the opening of sites in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy,
the Netherlands and Spain, and acquisitions in Sweden, Finland,
Norway, Denmark and Poland.

Although QXL.com has never quite matched the meteoric
success of eBay in the United States, it has overcome
some of the inherent difficulties of the very different
European market with great speed. It now operates in
nine languages and ten currencies, conducting both
consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer auctions
24 hours a day.

One of QXL’s most ambitious moves has been the proposed
acquisition of ricardo.de AG in a share-for-share exchange,
announced in May this year. Directors of QXL have said
they expect to complete the ricardo.de acquisition
by the end of August.