StepStone Acquires "Les Villages Emploi"
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Acquisition Broadens StepStone's Offering in France, Complementing Existing Sites Stepstone.fr and Sourcea.fr PARIS--(Business Wire)-- StepStone (OSE:STP), the leading global provider of Total Talent solutions, today announced the acquisition of Les Villages Emploi" (LVE), a French group of four websites including one aggregator site and three specialised market job boards. The sites cover a broad range of employment opportunities including Technical positions, Sales and Marketing, Administration, Finance and Accounting roles. This acquisition marks StepStone's second acquisition in the French market in the past six months, and will complement the company's existing French businesses, which includes job boards Sourcea.fr, acquired in December 2007, and StepStone.fr. In addition, StepStone Solutions France offers the full range of Talent Management solutions to customers such as LVMH, EDF, and Caisse d'Epargne. Founded in 1999 by Claude Levy, LVE typically carries over 3 000 job vacancies across the three specialised boards, jobtech.fr focussed on Technical jobs; marketvente.fr covering Sales and Marketing jobs and admincompta.fr offering Administration, Finance and Accounting roles. All vacancies are also advertised on the general site, lve.fr. StepStone has acquired LVE for an initial consideration of EUR 3.6m, to be settled in cash, together with further payments in 2009 dependent upon financial performance in 2008. Claude Levy will stay with the business and continue to lead the LVE team reporting into Valerie Vaillant, Directeur General StepStone France Online. The LVE websites will continue to operate independently alongside StepStone.fr and Sourcea.fr, which provide complementary job board resources and related services. LVE is expected to generate over EUR 1.2m of revenue in 2008 and be EBITDA accretive to StepStone. Ralf Baumann, Group Managing Director of StepStone Online, commented, "I am pleased to welcome Claude and the LVE team to our expanding French business. With a superb reputation for delivering quality results to their customers, this acquisition continues our strategy of offering our broad range of Talent Management solutions across multiple specialist job sites, supported by our generalist site Stepstone.fr." "I am delighted to be joining StepStone and look forward to leveraging the experience and resources of such a successful business to deliver even better value to our customers and job seekers," said Claude Levy, founder of LVE. Colin Tenwick, CEO of StepStone concluded, "The combination of our job board business and our software-as-a-service Solutions business places StepStone in a unique market position and allows us to offer the full range of Talent Management Solutions for the important French market. Building on the earlier acquisition of Sourcea.fr, I believe revenues from our StepStone team in France will make a significant contribution to our success in 2008 and beyond." About StepStone StepStone was founded in Norway in 1996 and pioneered the development of online recruitment. Today, StepStone is a leading global provider of Total Talent Solutions, ranging from careers websites to on-demand software for e-recruitment and talent management. StepStone's portfolio of Total Talent Solutions ranges from recruitment through on-boarding, training, career and succession planning, performance management and more. In addition, StepStone is Europe's number two operator of careers websites (based on ComScore data). Covering 13 European countries, its portfolio of online properties allows recruiters to source candidates quickly and effectively through individually focused campaigns. Thousands of organisations, including Amey, Aviva, AXA BMW, British Airways, Fiat, Royal Bank of Scotland and Xerox use StepStone's products and services to help them recruit qualified staff globally. StepStone is the only European-headquartered vendor to be recognised as a 'leader' by Gartner, Inc's "Magic Quadrant for E-Recruitment Software, 2008" report and has also been awarded the highest rating for Employee Performance Software by Bersin and Associates. For more information see: www.stepstone.com Brands2Life Catherine Moran / Robin Grainger stepstone@brands2life.com Tel: +44 (0)20 7592 1200 or StepStone Ian Clapp, Director of Investor Relations Tel: + 44 7850 128094 Copyright Business Wire 2008
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