Sulit.com.ph Sold for Undisclosed Sum

Leading classified ads site Sulit.com.ph has reportedly been sold to a foreign company for an undisclosed sum with negotiations going on as early as first quarter of this year.

I’ve been hearing about several  negotiations for months now but held off writing about it until the transaction has been confirmed and completed. Details of the acquisition is yet unknown at the moment and it looks like the foreign owners/investors still want to keep it a secret.

Sulit is one of the most visited websites in the Philippines with an estimated 46.3 million pageviews and 7.3 million visitors a month and over 12 million indexed pages in Google with about 350,000 registered members.

This super-SEO’d classifieds ad site only launched in 2006 and surpassed global giant eBay.ph by October 2007 in terms of traffic.

Google Trends puts Sulit’s daily unique visitors at ~80,000 while Alexa ranks Sulit at #16 in the Philippines (and the only home-grown site in the top 20).

Nix Nolledo (of PEx, Havoc Digital, Starfish Mobile and Xurpass) confirms the purchase on his Twitter account:

Note: Sulit.com.ph is owned and operated by Netrepreneur Connections Enterprise, Inc. Will update this post once I get official word from the founders of Sulit.

Update: RJ of Sulit confirms the acquisition in this forum message:

Late last night, a topic was posted by one of our dear Sulitizens asking if Sulit.com.ph was indeed Sold. Eventually, the news came from a prominent Filipino blogger who got his confirmation from a Twitter account of a Filipino serial tech entrepreneur.

So what is the real deal behind this news?

It is no secret that Sulit.com.ph has a tremendous growth for the past 2 years and most of you know that Arianne (bigbucks) and I (being the founders) are doing our best to give a top notch service that we can offer our members and visitors. But eventually, there will be a limit on what we can physically provide and we believe that our users deserve more.

Therefore, our strong growth has led us to look for outside advice that will help us maximize our performance in critical business areas. We are also considering the strategic options that would allow us (the founders) to take the business to the next level and to maximize the benefits that our users, especially our members, receive. As entrepreneurs, we believe that we have to identify the areas that we are good at and we have to look for people and entities that have the skills and resources to complement ours.

In line with these developments, we will make further announcements if and when we believe it is appropriate to do so. But one thing for sure, we will still be the captains that will lead Sulit.com.ph, together with our users, to new heights for the foreseeable future. We have a lot of exciting plans for Sulit.com.ph and we will see to it that we are there when these plans are implemented. In short, we are here for the long haul.