Orange Telecom has completed the sale of the oldest Polish horizontal portal Wirtualna Polska (wp.pl). The final price amounted to 383 mln PLN. Meanwhile, one of the buyers, O2 Group (o2.pl), has sold 20% of its shares to the fund MCI Management. The combined O2/WP is now the biggest portal in Poland.
WP and O2 will work together as the Grupa Wirtualna Polska. According to November’s data, the websites of linked companies (taking into account shared visits) had 17.38 million of visitors and 2.82 billion of page views, taking the second place among web publishers after Google. They have the reach of 82% of the Polish internet.
The structural fusion will happen at the end of June. The new portal of the Grupa Wirtualna Polska has set itself a goal to achieve the level of 19.0 mln visitors montlhy, as it is the current result of Google with which the new structure wants to compete. They plan to develop video content, mobile offer and the premium content. After 5 years they plan to invest more in the e-commerce market.
