Adultery website AshleyMadison.com plans London IPO

Ashley Madison, the online matchmaker for married people wanting to have extramarital affairs, has announced plans for an initial public offering in London this year.

The Toronto-based group said it is planning to raise roughly $200m which it says will fuel its expansion into "the international market of adultery", and allow it to take advantage of growing demand for its services.

Ashley Madison's parent company, Avid Life Media, said it was undergoing due diligence procedures and talking to analysts before deciding whether it will attempt a flotation on the main London Stock Exchange or its junior AIM market. The company values itself at $1bn.

The website - which carries the slogan "Life is short. Have an affair" - makes money by charging men for "credits", which they can cash in to gain introductions to women.

Avid Life Media, which also runs other specialist dating sites such as Cougarlife.com and EstablishedMen.com, has previously failed to launch an IPO in Canada, blaming lack of investor appetite. It has private investors who have remained anonymous.

Christoph Kraemer, Ashley Madison's head of international relations, said he believed the UK would prove to be more accommodating.

"The most logical place would have been Asia given the growth potential, but considering Asian culture and views on infidelity, the likelihood of the IPO succeeding on Asian stock market is probably not very high," he said.

"I'm half French and half German, and I think Europeans have a more laid back, laissez faire attitude to infidelity."

According to the group, AshleyMadisom.com has more than 34m members in 46 countries, making it the second-largest dating website by users behind Match.com.

The group said it had sales of $115m in 2014, representing a 45 per cent increase compared with the previous year, with 50 per cent of its business is in the US.

The funds raised in any flotation would be used to launch the site in more countries, with the aim of having more than half of its sales in Asia by the end of this decade. The IPO plans were first reported by Bloomberg.

The group has faced regulatory obstacles in some countries, however. The site is banned in Singapore, for instance. Last year, the company launched a lawsuit against the South Korean government after being banned in the country. But it dropped the action after the a Korean court overturned a decades-old law banning adultery. Ashley Madison is reopening services there this week.

Mr Kraemer said he did not anticipate similar problems in other countries. "Banning us will not eliminate infidelity," he said. "Infidelity has been around as long as monogamy . . . if you were to ban us, you would have to ban Google and Facebook and other communications platforms that people use to have an affair."

© The Financial Times Limited 2015. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation