Optus will pay $6 million to acquire Australian restaurant directory Eatability. The website has 235,000 reviews and 37,000 restaurant listings.
The acquisition is pending and subject to review by the Foreign Investment Review Board, but Optus expects to complete the deal “in the coming weeks”, an Optus spokesperson said. The acquisition would make Eatability a wholly owned subsidiary of Optus, which in turn is a subsidiary of SingTel.
Optus said the deal is “central to Optus’ strategy of providing more localised digital content and services for the Australian market and will be a strong foundation for future transaction-based business and mobile services in the lifestyle category.”
Eatability was already an Optus partner, providing content for the Go Places mobile app. Optus vice president, Austin Bryan, said the carrier planned to work with Eatability to add new features to the service. Optus also plans to optimise the Eatability website for smartphones, an Optus spokesperson said.
“Our objective is to make it easy for users ‘on the go’ to discover what’s happening around them,” said SingTel principal, Loo Cheng Chuan.
The SingTel Group has lately seemed hungry for food websites. The company also just acquired one of Singapore’s leading food websites, HungryGoWhere.
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