Have you ever wanted to paint your walls or pull the weeds out of your garden, and you just
can’t be stuffed? Australia’s No.1 marketplace for local services, Airtasker (ASX: ART), allows you to delegate your laziness for a fee to strangers that want to get the job done for you, basically the Uber of small jobs. Airtasker today has entered into a $9.8m agreement to acquire Australia’s 3rd largest local service platform, OneFlare, which has a strong presence in trades, home improvement and professional services. The $9.8m acquisition price represents 1.6x the forecast $6m revenue expected to be generated by OneFlare in FY23. Historical and future earnings expectations of OneFlare have not been disclosed publicly. That $9.8m will be funded by a combination of $7.55m in ART shares and $2.55m in cash. 50% of shares issued to the vendors or OneFlare will be held in escrow for a period of 12 months with the remaining 50% to be released after 24 months. To assist Airtasker with their cashflow post-acquisition, the Company has also announced a Placement that will seek to raise $6.25m from institutional and sophisticated investors at an Offer Price of $0.43 per share. That capital raise will include $3.55m of shares that will be subscribed to by Airtasker founders, subject to shareholder approval. The balance of cash not applied to the acquisition of OneFlare will be applied to integration and growth initiatives to combine OneFlare with Airtasker with the intention of retiring the OneFlare brand by June 2024. OneFlare started six years ago where they connect high quality Australian businesses with customers who are in need. Their database holds approximately 14,500 businesses and has an average of 540,000 new customers per annum. With 50,000+ jobs posted each month, each job has an estimated average task price of $2,300+. The strategic rationale behind the acquisition will be combining two of the country’s best marketplaces into one platform. This would strengthen the overall marketplace and offer more job opportunities to service providers whilst also providing customers with access to a greater range of services, skills and faster response times. “I’m super stoked to bring together Airtasker and OneFlare to create Australia’s no1 marketplace for local services. Together, we can offer our customers access to an even greater range of local services and faster response time whilst creating more job opportunities than ever before,” said Tim Fung, Airtasker CEO and Co-Founder. “By acquiring OneFlare, we also accelerate a push into higher value service categories including trades, home improvement and professional services to deliver on our mission: to empower people to realise the full value of their skills.” The acquisition will go hand-in-hand with a Share Purchase Plan (SPP) that Airtasker will undertake to raise $1.2m from existing ART shareholders, at the same Offer Price as the Placement at $0.43, albeit several weeks later. Airtasker shares have slipped from their highs of $1.97, two days after their IPO in April 2021, to its most recent all-time low of $0.46 just last week. With the share prices currently sitting at $0.51, shareholders are hoping that they can catch a bargain if it remains around this price during the SPP.
