uBid to Pursue Agressive M&A Strategy, site has 5.5 million members

[Kristijntje]

uBid presented a picture of its online-auction business on Tuesday at the ThinkEquity Annual Growth Conference in San Francisco. uBid President and CEO Robert H. Tomlinson, Jr., detailed uBid's history and financial performance and outlined uBid's recent strategies.

uBid has direct relationships with 3,700 OEMs and has 1500 direct merchants in its UCM certified merchant program. It has a user base of 5.5 million going back to 1997.

Tomlinson said uBid's business model is a hybrid of its direct program, which achieves greater margins, and the certified merchant program, which gives it tremendous growth in uBid's GAAP margins. He said uBid will maintain a small percentage of its business in the direct program.

Tomlinson said the company had recently acquired assets of C2C site Bidville.com, and said, "We will continue to do M&A work aggressively in the space along with a new company called Trading Group, which is a B2B arm, which we expanded just recently." uBid gained 900,000 customers through the Bidville acquisition...

full article: http://auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y06/m09/i14/s02