ASIA-PACIFIC – SINGAPORE, MARCH 12, 2012: Singapore-based telecommunications company SingTel has agreed to buy Amobee, a specialist mobile marketing agency, for $321M to add a third leg to its landline and mobile phone businesses. SingTel has operations in 20 countries and is partly owned by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek.
Amobee, based in Redwood, California, provide advertisers a platform to purchase mobile advertising, even as they give mobile operators and publishers a platform to drive revenue from mobile advertising. Among their clients are Zynga, Google, Nokia, eBay, Skype, Mozilla Foundation, and Barnes & Noble. While Amobee’s gross assets are at a mere $600,000, global forecasts have predicted the mobile advertising business to be worth $30T in 2015.
SingTel is known for recent big-money purchases in the past decade. It bought Australia’s second-biggest mobile network Optus for $14B in 2001, and Pakistan’s Warid Telecom for $758M in 2007. SingTel also owns a stake in India’s Bharti Airtel.
Amobee CEO Trevor Healy will continue to run the company.
