This story appears in the Septemper 7, 2014 issue of Forbes. Subscribe
For the last seven years Rocket Internet and its German founders--Marc, Oliver and Alexander Samwer--have made a living taking the billion-dollar ideas of successful American technology companies and cloning them abroad. From Zalando, the Zappos of Europe, to Lazada, the
In spite of its IPO plans, Rocket surprised everyone in early August by announcing a $445 million investment from the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. Surprise turned into shock when a week later Rocket added a $582 million investment from German tech firm United Internet, which took a 10.7% stake in the company. Following those investments the incubator is now valued at about $5.7 billion.
As a result of the private capital investments, the Samwers join the ten-figure-fortune club, a sign of validation for the brothers' vision for global e-commerce domination. They currently own about 54% of Rocket Internet through their investment company, Global Founders Fund. That vehicle also holds a 17% stake in Zalando, the private fashion-retailing sensation that is valued currently at $5.3 billion and is also taking steps toward an IPO. The Samwers declined to comment for this story, but middle brother Oliver, 42, recently told the Financial Times that "We want Rocket to be the biggest consumer Internet group outside the U.S. and China."
That's a bold statement for the trio of brothers whose infatuation with American tech firms began when they were business school students in the late 1990s. In 1998 the Samwers were living in San Francisco and studying many of the emerging companies in Silicon Valley, with Oliver coauthoring a book on his findings entitled America's Most Successful Startups. The time spent in California also served as inspiration for the brothers' first venture as they noticed that plenty of people at the time were starting to buy and sell on
Moving back to Germany the next year, they started online auction copycat Alando in Berlin, launching the site on Mar. 1. By May 30 they had met with eBay cofounder Pierre Omidyar and had agreed to sell the company to eBay for $43 million.
That success would provide the blueprint for the next decade. By August 2000 they had founded Jamba!, a wireless content provider of pictures, games and music for mobile phones. They sold that to Verisign in 2004 for $273 million. That act was followed by the backing of StudiVZ, the German clone of Facebook, as well as a smart investment of more than $10 million in Mark Zuckerberg's company in 2008.
The brothers founded Rocket Internet in 2007 and did little to hide their intentions to mimic the best American e-commerce companies. Zalando was created in 2008 by Robert Gentz and David Schneider with funding from the Samwers, who closely watched the developments of online shoe retailer Zappos. Back then the American company's ascent to $1 billion in gross sales gave the Germans proof that global e-commerce would be a rapidly evolving industry, where companies that established themselves quickly and executed well could dominate their local markets.
In 2010 Rocket cloned
The next logical step for the Samwers and Rocket is a public offering. The company will seek a valuation estimated to be north of $6-billion. That will likely happen on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, said sources, who also noted that Rocket has selected banks JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, UBS and Germany-based Berenberg to lead the offering.
Follow me on Twitter at @RMac18 or email me at rmac@forbes.com.
