E-commerce veteran Ted Deikel raises his stake in auction site uBid.com
Ted Deikel, former CEO of catalog and online retailer Fingerhut, has increased to 12% his stake in uBid.com Holdings Inc., parent company of online auction site uBid.com. Deikel had acquired a 10% stake in the company in November when he purchased 1,784,000 shares, and he recently acquired an additional 466,000 shares, uBid.com Holdings announced this week.
Shares in the company, which trades on the NASDAQ exchange, are currently priced at just under $1. The Chicago-based company has a market capitalization of $17.3 million.
As he did in announcing his earlier investment, Deikel cited the September appointment of Jeff Hoffman as uBid.com CEO as a factor in his investment. Hoffman had been an executive at online travel services provider PriceLine.com. "I believe now, as I did in November, that uBid`s wealth of online selling expertise, strong relationships with their sellers and Jeff Hoffman`s experience in the e-commerce space, position uBid to capture significant market share in the largely untapped multi-billion dollar online liquidation market," Deikel said.
"Having the continued support of a shareholder of Mr. Deikel`s caliber only reinforces our strategy of offering the most robust seller sales solutions on the internet," Hoffman said.
Deikel led Fingerhut from 1974 to 1984 and again from 1990 to 1999. In the late 1990s he moved the catalog retailer aggressively into e-commerce, launching several web sites and providing fulfillment services for online retailers. In 1999, Federated Department Stores bought Fingerhut for $1.7 billion, only to sell Fingerhut’s web site and certain other assets three years later back to FAC Acquisitions LLC, a firm headed by Deikel and partner Tom Petters. Fingerhut is No. 127 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.
For the third quarter ended Sept. 30, uBid.com Holdings Inc. reported revenue of $$9.72 million, down 32% from $14.37 million in the same quarter last year. The company reported a net loss of $2.2 million in the 2007 quarter, compared with a loss of $2.7 million the year before.
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