Estonia's EMT buys 51 percent of online meeting place
11:30, 5. aprill 2006
TALLINN, Apr 05, BNS - The biggest Estonian mobile communication firm AS EMT has bought a 51-percent holding in Serenda Invest, administrator of a young people's online meeting place, rate.ee.
EMT said the company could see in the purchase opportunties for the offer of both telecommunication and multimedia services.
Rate.ee has 360,000 registered users.
A holding of 49 percent in Serenda Investment belongs to Rate Solutions, owned by Andrei Korobeinik, creator of rate.ee.
In 2005, rate.ee earned its earlier sole owner 4.9 million kroons (EUR 313,000) of profit at 6.2 million kroons of sales. The year before Rate Solutions earned 1.25 million kroons of profit at sales of 2.7 million kroons. As a result sales of the company increased by 130 percent and the profit by 300 percent in just one year.
Andrei Korobeinik has earlier said that the company also has Latvian and Lithuanian projects and there would be expansion to other countries during this year.
According to Adnet, an internet-based media agency, 130,000 different people a day and 350,000 a week visit the rate.ee portal. Different pages of the portal are opened 21 million times in one day and 150 million times during one week.
The main idea of rate.ee is the opportunity of publishing your own and evaluating other peoples' pictures. The portal is mainly used by teenagers.
(EUR 1 = EEK 15.65)