Catalog and e-commerce veteran Ted Deikel buys 10% of auction site uBid.com
Ted Deikel, former CEO of catalog and online retailer Fingerhut, has purchased a 10% stake in the parent company of online auction site uBid.com, buying 1.8 million shares in market transactions, uBid.com has disclosed. Shares in uBid.com Holdings Inc. have traded at between 78 cents and $1.32 in the past three months.
Deikel pointed to the September appointment of Jeff Hoffman as uBid.com CEO as a factor in his investment. “I believe uBid’s wealth of online selling experience, recent focus on maximizing relationships with their merchants and CEO Jeff Hoffman’s unique experience in the auction and e-commerce space positions the company to win big in the multi-billion dollar online liquidation market,” Deikel says.
“UBid is elated to have Mr. Deikel as an investor,” says Hoffman, a former executive at travel services retailer Priceline.com and other e-commerce companies. “Having a shareholder of Ted’s caliber expresses his confidence in uBid with such a significant investment validates our strategy of offering the most robust seller sales solutions on the Internet.”
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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