Google's Latest Acquistion: First Korean Foothold?

Google (GOOG) has acquired TNC (Tatter and Company), a Korean blog platform company that compares itself to Automattic, the team behind WordPress.

In his blog post on the acquisition, TNC founder Chang Kim shed some light on the company’s history, and why he thinks it was acquired:

“Despite the danger of sounding too self-important, I would say our company was a fairly good acquisition target for Google. First, we had a killer product: Our previous work, Tistory blog service (now property of Daum as we sold the service to the Korea’s #2 portal), made to the top 10 Korean web destination in less than a year from launch, showing some 30,000% growth over the initial 8 months. While other blog services seem to be exploring the idea of integrating social networks with blogs only lately, our new blog service Textcube (link in Korean) had already implemented the feature much earlier. Secondly, we have great engineering talents. Many of our software engineers hail from the nation’s leading comp sci programs, such as KAIST.”

Chang Kim speculates that this is one of Google’s first acquisitions in Korea (though he admits that not all acquisitions are disclosed by the search giant). He also writes that while the deal is in part related to his product and team, Google is likely trying to establish a stronger presence in the Korean market, where it hasn’t performed well. Kim explains that Koreans tend to prefer web portals - the one-stop-shop online centers like Yahoo - over searching for content.

Comments

[andyn:]

GOOG is really cheap at $440 a stock on a P/E basis. In Aug, it closed at $510. It was brutally sold into the $410s with the hedgies liquidating. The upcoming earnings release should confirm this but I wont be surprised if this is in the $500's before that. Jump on for a good 20% run by Oct.

2008 Sep 13 10:34 AM