PhotoBox merges with Moonpig in £120 million deal

PhotoBox, which competes with Zazzle and Spreadshirt in the online digital photo service sector, has merged with Moonpig, the unlikely named online greetings card retailer in the UK. It’s clearly a sign of the heat in the market that M&A like this is starting to happen. PhotoBox is paying £120 million, mostly in shares, with existing shareholders in Moonpig rolling over a portion of their respective shareholdings in to the share capital of the merged entity. It’s also raising new equity from xisting shareholders – Highland Capital Partners, Index Ventures and Harbourvest – and a group of new private equity investors led by Insight Ventures alongside Quilvest Ventures and Greenspring Associates.

Senior management on both sides is staying on with Stan Laurent serving as Group President & Chief Executive Officer and Iain Martin serving as Moonpig.com Managing Director. Moonpig.com Founder and Executive Chairman, Nick Jenkins stays as an advisor. Insight Venture’s Lawrence Handen will also join the Group Board of Directors, as will Lionel Bergeron (Quilvest Ventures) and Ashton Newhall (Greenspring Associates) as Board observers.

PhotoBox says it has processed more than 1 million individual photo prints each day in 2010 for its 11 million members. Turnover was €80m (£72m) in 2010. The European online photography market is estimated to be worth more than €1.0 billion per annum.

Moonpig.com’s greeting card market said to be worth £1.0 billion per annum, of which only 4 per cent happens online. Moonpig.com shipped over 12 million cards to nearly three million customers in the past 12 months. Moonpig’s turnover was £38m in its fiscal year ending April 2011.

Photobox was formerly Photoways from France.