Migme revives Sold.sg with acquisition

Since listing on the ASX in August last year, Migme has been hard at work building up its social entertainment platform to be bigger and better. Since then, it acquired LoveByte – a chat app for couples – and invested in games platform developer MatchMe. Today, Migme has announced yet another acquisition, this time of penny auction startup Sold.sg for a mixture of cash and shares – a curious move given that the business had shut down in late 2013.

The reason, according to Migme CEO Steven Goh, is that Sold.sg would add an ecommerce component to Migme’s virtual gifts and games platform – the latter had surpassed 9 million MAUs just last month – which is in line with its vision to create a “playful social ecommerce experience” for its users. Chinese C2C marketplace Taobao was the team’s inspiration for this – Goh says they hope to replicate its success:

The hallmark of Taobao, in our view, was the amazing community that emerged on top of it. We’ll be attaching and embedding Sold.sg in Migme with a view of integrating it into our chatrooms, working with our games […] We’ll roll this out as a consumer experience by middle of the year.
​

Sold.sg’s founding team will not be joining Migme. They have, however, been consulting on aspects of the business and working with the latter’s team to bring the business back to life. Goh is confident that, under Migme’s charge, Sold.sg will not suffer a similar slump that led to its closure previously.

“I think the difference [now] with Migme is that we have a strong marketing and business development presence in a range of markets, and will be able to take Sold.sg to critical mass and beyond,” says Goh.

Sold.sg will be re-launched in February, and will be progressively integrated with the migme platform in 2015.