The Homa Files

According to Forbes …

In December 2010, Amazon invested $175 million into LivingSocial.

In the third quarter of 2012 Amazon reported loss of $274 million … blaming most of the loss on its investment in LivingSocial.

At that time, Amazon wrote down LivingSocial’s  “goodwill” – or intangible value –  to almost nothing.

Concurrently with Amazon’s “accounting adjustment”, LivingSocial announced it was laying off  about 10% of its staff.

This week, LivingSocial confirmed that its Seattle office is now closing and that “the team that had been located there are still with LivingSocial and will be working remotely.”

The Seattle office closure follows in the wake of a $110M round of emergency funding at a “down valuation”.

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Flashback: Remember Groupon …

Back in 2010, Google offered to buy Groupon for $5.75 billion.

Droupon turned the offer down and went the IPO route in late 2011.

Today, Groupon has a $4.54 billion market capitalization.

The stock stumbled, dropping about 2/3’s from the IPO price …  and has been languishing.

I guess the bloom is off the deal-a-day rose … or maybe the business model was flawed from the start.

Thanks to SMH for feeding the lead.

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This entry was posted on June 20, 2013 at 6:59 am and is filed under Groupon - Living Social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.