mobile.

de Company profile
The Business Model
Logging some 11.2 million unique visitors per month (AGOF internet facts 2015-10)
and 4 million new car world visitors, mobile.de is the most popular vehicle market in
Germany for the buying and selling of vehicles. There are currently over 1.4 million
vehicles including 159,000 stock vehicles and on-day-registrations listed on the
site featuring the largest range of cars, commercial vehicles and motorcycles in
Germany (source: Center Automotive Research). Sellers advertising their vehicles on
mobile.de can reach out to customers all over Germany and internationally. The wide
selection of new and used vehicles and the coverage achieved by mobile.de ensure
a balance between supply and demand and lead to a high rate of successful sales.
mobile.de does not intervene in the sales transaction itself.
mobile.de is designed for both private customers and professional vehicle dealers.
More than 40,000 dealers in Germany or around 90 percent of all vehicle dealers
registered in Germany use the vehicle marketplace. mobile.de also helps its users
find financing and insurance deals and it offers online advertising options.

The Product
mobile.de offers its customers a reliable tool for buying and selling vehicles. Since
the company was founded, its emphasis has been on the user-friendliness of its
product. Thanks to the sites clear structure and ease of use, sellers can quickly
upload ads with images to the mobile.de database. Buyers can filter search results
according to their own preferences in order to find specific deals with just one click.
The extensive mobile.de database quickly gives customers an overview of the market
and of pricing information, which forms a good basis for fair negotiations. Users will
find tips and hints for buying and selling cars in the mobile.de guide, which includes
a sample sales agreement, transaction checklists and information about insurance
and financing (available in German).

Services for Private Customers

Private customers can place ads at no cost on mobile.de. The basic package allows
users to advertise one vehicle with five images for 8 weeks. Ads upgraded to the
Eyecatcher option are featured prominently on the homepage by random selection

and they include more and larger images and extended ad runs. Buyers and sellers
can look at comparable vehicles in the mobile.de database to get an idea of the
average sale price of a particular model. Since the expected costs play a decisive role
when buying a car, potential buyers can view insurance rates and financing options
directly in each ad on mobile.de. Users are given an overview of the cheapest
insurers1 and current financing rates2.

Services for Car Dealers

Business sellers can place ads in the Professional Domain with descriptive texts up to
2,000 characters long and a total of 15 vehicle images. In addition to new and used
vehicles, dealers can advertise export vehicles, pre-registration cars, demonstration
vehicles, classic cars and one-year-old cars. With the mobile.de Vehicle Client,
registered dealers can manage their vehicles and customer data centrally on their
own PC and they can regularly monitor their sales activity with the mobile.de Success
Monitor. Vehicle rental firms, leasing companies and manufacturers also have access
to the mobile.de Professional Domain in order to advertise their offers exclusively to
other businesses (B2B). Furthermore, dealers specialising in intermediary trade can
search the dealer area specifically for net prices or ads with dealer prices.
There are many other services for registered vehicle dealers as well, such as the
professional Car Park for saving and comparing selected vehicles and the free SMS
service which notifies sellers by text message whenever a customer sends an email
enquiry about one of their offers.

Success Rates
In 2012 a total of 32.4 billion Euros worth of vehicles were sold via mobile.de with
one vehicle sold every nine seconds. Car dealers who post their vehicles on
mobile.de and other Internet vehicle markets are making an average of 39 percent of
their sales through mobile.de. Users outside Germany also take frequent advantage
of the over 1.4 million vehicles offered on mobile.de; 22 percent of the vehicles sold
by business sellers on mobile.de are destined for countries other than Germany.3

1http://www.mobile.de/magazin/finanzierung_und_versicherung/versicherung/versicherung_rechner.ht

ml

2http://www.mobile.de/magazin/finanzierung_und_versicherung/finanzierung/finanzierung_kredit_rech

ner.html

Company History
Hamburg, 1996: The Internet was still in its infancy in Germany when copywriter Vijay
Sapre and programmer Ralf Prehn developed one of the first online vehicle
databases. The idea was popular right from the start and the number of visitors and
vehicles listed on the site grew steadily. The success of mobile.de was owed in part
to Rdiger and Hans-Christian Bartholatus, two brothers who ran a car dealership in
Hamburg and invested in mobile.de in 1997. The positive development of the
company prompted the British private equity firm Granville Baird (London) to invest at
the end of 1999. Contrary to the reputation of the crisis-ridden e-commerce industry
at the time, the business model of mobile.de proved successful and the company has
been in the black since June 2001.
In April 2004, mobile.de became a subsidiary of the eBay International AG. The
following year, the car market moved to its new headquarters in Dreilinden / Berlin.
mobile.de is now a part of the eBay Classifieds Group, a global leader in the digital
classified business with local sites in more than 1,000 cities.

Malte Krger, CEO mobile.de GmbH

Since April 2012 Malte Krger has held the position of Managing Director at
mobile.de GmbH. He is responsible for the ongoing strengthening of the mobile.de
brand and the business models strategic development. These include the opening
up of important key markets like the new car sales. Moreover, Krger focuses on
further growth areas of mobile.de the B2B business and the division Automotive
Intelligence (AI).
Krger was born on October 10th, 1971 in Essen. After visiting school and completing
his apprenticeship as a wholesale and export/import trader at Ferrostaal AG in
Essen, he studied business administration at the University Erlangen-Nuremberg from
1995 to 2000. At the peak of the New Economy, together with several fellow
students he founded his first internet start-up company, which was sold in 2000.
From 2000 to 2005 Krger worked i.a. as head of Product Management and
Business Development at AutoScout24, before he founded the car information- and
evaluation platform autoplenum.de in cooperation with the publishing house G. v.
Holtzbrinck in 2006. Since 2009 he is working for the German market leader
mobile.de.

3 These figures are based on a study by GfK Nuremberg from November 2013.