DST and Naspers Considering Merger of Polish Internet Holdings

Mail.ru co-owners Digital Sky Technologies (DST) and Naspers appear to be engaged in talks that could result in a merger of the two companies’ social networking holdings in Poland. Russian-based DST owns a 75% stake in Nasza-Klasa.pl while the South African-based Naspers owns the Gadu Gadu instant messaging service.

Naspers is believed to be looking into several eastern European social networking sites though neither they nor DST have commented on any possibility of a merger. Should the deal go through it would create a social networking juggernaut reaching a combined 34 million Polish users.

Nasza-Klasa.pl (www.nasza-klasa.pl)
Launched in the third quarter of 2006, Nasza-Klasa is an internet portal designed to help former classmates reconnect and interact. The concept is similar to that of North America’s Classmates.com. Individual users register for the site according to school and graduation date, whereupon their profiles are matched with others who share the same information.

The more than 27 million registered users can design and maintain their own web pages, upload photos, share favourite links, etc.

Nasza-Klasa.pl is based in Wroclaw, Poland.

Gada Gadu (www.gadu-gadu.pl)
Gadu Gadu is Poland’s leading Instant Messaging platform boasting 15 million registered accounts and daily usage of 6.5 million users. The platform offers not only a standard chat service, but file sharing, casual gaming, and VoIP as well. The company’s technology is proprietary, identifying users with a unique ID number in a manner similar to ICQ.

Gadu Gadu is based in Warsaw and employs nearly 200 people.