Friends Reunited up for sale

£25m+ price tag

Friends Reunited is up for sale and there's a £25m+ price tag on its head. The school and college reunion site has appointed BDO Stoy Hayward to find a trade buyer or a management buy-in team, and the process is "quite advanced", co-founder Stephen Pankhurst told the Sunday Times yesterday.

The Pankhursts and fellow founder Jason Porter own 85 per cent of the business, which employs just 10 people. Recently, it spread its wings overseas, setting up sites in Australia, South Africa and on the ontinent.

The founders have done a magnificent job in getting Friends Reunited this far, but it will need different skills and more capital for the business to hit the really big time.

Accorsing to unnamed sources cited by The Sunday Times, the big portals would be most interested in buying Friend's Reunited. This makes sense: in the UK, Friends Reunited is truly mass-market, claiming eight million "members". Can it only be 2000, when Friends Reunited sprang to life? ®