After a period of serious speculation, it has been confirmed that popular media sales company, Habari, has been bought by giant media and printing group, Caxton.
Caxon, which is South Africa‘s largest publisher and commercial printer, has made a smart move in acquiring Habari. With digital ad revenue skyrocketing in South Africa at the moment, Caxon could get the upper hand in this playing field with Habari.
Habari is quite the acquistion. Founded in 2004, the company has offices in many fore-fronting African cities such as Cape Town, Johannesburg, Nairobi and Lagos.
Some of Habari‘s biggest names in the African digital real estate scene include LinkedIN, MTV, All4Women, BBC.com, 2Go and Autotrader.
One of Habari Media‘s many creations, integrated agency Machine – which was founded just over a year ago in 2012 – will still operate as normal and will be unaffected by this acquisition. However, CEO of Habari Media, Adrian Hewlett, will leave Habari to solely focus on Machine.
On the other hand, the very same operational management team will continue to be at the helm of things.
Wayne Bischoff will still be the MD, as will Garth Rhoda as sales director, Byron John as the insights director and Marius Greeff as the company‘s commercial director.
Bischoff also said that the buyout will secure great opportunities for Habari Media and that him and his team are excited about this new phase of business:
“œThe buyout represents a huge opportunity for Habari Media and we are very excited to become a part of the Caxton group…[sic] We look forward to exploiting synergies across the existing portfolio of Caxton‘s media platforms and brands, whilst continuing to provide existing partnerships and advertisers with the same level of professional service they have become accustomed to“ he said.
The acquisition amount remains undisclosed for now, but we are betting that it was quite the hefty sum. It will be exciting to see how Habari and Caxton will influence the digital media scene.
Source: Ventureburn
