Japan's Advantage sells Wavedash to US-listed strategic for $61m

Advantage acquired the company, then known as Life Living, from SBI Holdings at an enterprise valuation of JPY 10.6m (then USD 86m) in 2015. Life Living was a listed company, requiring the deal to be structured as a tender offer.

At the time of Advantage's acquisition, the company had reported annual EBITDA of about JPY 3bn, and revenue of JPY 8bn; this was split across two core business areas of real estate and online ticketing.

The ticketing business was separated and became Wavedash with additional investments in service planning, systems development, marketing, and recruitment.

"Wavedash is the market leader in the Japanese secondary ticketing market with a large and growing customer network supported by robust technology and compliance capabilities," Stan Chia, CEO of Vivid Seats, said in a statement.

"We are excited to grow our TAM [total addressable market] by expanding internationally with a market leading business."

Wavedash specialises in online ticket distribution services for entertainment events, including payment mediation. The core operation is a customer-facing website called Ticket.co.jp, which is said to have facilitated some 7m transactions.

Web traffic analytics firm Similarweb has clocked Ticket.co.jp's total site visits at 3.4m, ranking it among the top players in its segment locally.

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• Topics
• North Asia
• Consumer
• Support services
• Trade sale
• Japan
• Advantage Partners
• TMT