Moonpig.com sold to Photobox for EUR 136m

Online greetings card retailer Moonpig.com – who provide Royal Mail with millions of items to post each year – has been acquired by Photobox, a European-based online digital photo service provider. Moonpig.com is the UK market leader for providing personalised gift cards. The company designed and shipped in excess of 12m cards last year, which were delivered by the soon-to-be-privatised operator.

Photobox, whose 2010 turnover was €80m (£72m), has bought the company for EUR 136m (£120m). Moonpig.com’s turnover was EUR 43m (£38m) in its fiscal year ending April 2011, and it will continue to operate as a separate brand.

The single card market in the UK – Moonpig.com’s core market – is estimated to be worth in excess of £1bn per annum, of which only an estimated 4% is currently fulfilled online.

Management teams from both businesses remain with the enlarged group, post-merger, with Stan Laurent serving as group president & CEO and Iain Martin serving as Moonpig.com managing director. Moonpig.com founder and executive chairman, Nick Jenkins will serve as an advisor to the Group’s Board of Directors.

Jenkins said: “Everyone at Moonpig has thoroughly enjoyed building Moonpig into a household brand. Every morning the equivalent of a Premier League football stadium full of people get a Moonpig card and they love them.

“We now want to build on that success. The explosion in digital photography over the past few years has been evident in the number of our customers using their own photographs to great and often hilarious effect in our cards. Stan and I both believe that we can now offer a much wider range of photographic products to our customers while adding our own Moonpig creativity. We can also take our core greeting card product to countries which would be difficult to access as a standalone business.”

Commenting on the news, Laurent, said: “It’s great to see two high-growth, profitable and ambitious European online brands come together to leverage each other’s strengths and create a global market leader.”