Online price comparison website Pricecheck, the largest website of its type in Africa, is changing hands again, travelling from current owner Naspers back to Kevin Tucker and a company called Silvertree Internet Holdings.
Kevin Tucker said in a statement “It is an exciting prospect to retake the reins of a company I started almost a decade ago. Naspers, through investment and strategic partnerships, has built PriceCheck to be a leading price and product comparison platform. My challenge now is to consolidate the considerable headway they have made over the last five years and build an infrastructure to service the many millions more Africans that will be venturing online for consumer goods, predominantly via mobile, in the coming years.”
Further growth for the online service, which has seen steady increases in both South Africa and Nigeria, will likely come from mobile traffic. Mobile usage is expected to undergo a twenty-fold increase in Africa by 2019 and given that 40% of Pricecheck’s South African traffic (as well as 90% of the company’s Nigerian traffic) comes from a mobile device, it’s not hard to see what the future holds for the comparative shopping service.
Current Pricecheck CEO Andre de Wet will be stepping down, with original founder Kevin Tucker taking up the mantle. de Wet said “This has been a fantastic journey and I believe that the new CEO Kevin Tucker and Silvertree can build further on what we built at PriceCheck and I honestly wish them all the best going forward.”