EQT has held preliminary talks with Blackstone and Permira, which led the consortium that acquired Adevinta and took it private in June last year, the Financial Times (FT) reports, citing “people familiar with the matter.”

However, the newspaper added that the talks were at a preliminary stage. It noted that EQT, Permira and Blackstone had declined to comment on the story.

It had been thought that Adevinta was planning an IPO for Mobile.de, and earlier this month, the FT reported that it had selected investment banks Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan to work on listing plans. The newspaper said that the deal could value the company at around €10 billion ($11.7 billion), adding that the IPO would be one of the largest in Europe in recent years.

The IPO could still happen, but these discussions with EQT suggest that Adevinta’s owners are keeping their options open.

EQT and Adevinta are already doing business in Spain: In July this year, the former agreed to buy Adevinta’s Spain-based marketplaces, including auto marketplace Coches.net (not to be confused with Santander Bank’s Coches.com), job board InfoJobs and horizontal Milanuncios.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but Spain-based business newspaper Expansión reported at the time that the deal valued Adevinta Spain at around €2.0 billion, citing “industry sources.”

Adevinta was formed in 2018 as a spinoff from Schibsted and taken public a year later. At the time, it mainly operated in six core European markets: Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium. The company’s marketplaces included LeBonCoin in France and Marktplaats.nl in the Netherlands.

During the less than 18 months since it changed hands, Adevinta has exited joint ventures in Ireland (Distilled) and Austria (Willlhaben), as well as agreeing to exit Spain.

It was recently revealed that Adevinta had decided to shutter job board InfoJobs Italia at the end of this year.

The AIM Group has contacted Adevinta, Mobile.de, Blackstone, Permira and EQT for comment, and we will update this story if we receive a response.

CEO Tomy Schoenfeld informed employees that the deal could close by then.

Four major foreign investment funds — Blackstone, Francisco Partners, Apax, and Warburg Pincus — are competing, with Blackstone seen as the frontrunner. A fifth fund, CVC, is reportedly preparing to submit a bid. Barclays and Citi are managing the transaction.

Financials obtained by CalcalisTech revealed sustained growth for Yad2, with 2024 revenue at €62.4 million and a 46% adjusted EBITDA margin.

In 2025, revenue is expected to reach €83 million with adjusted EBITDA of €37 million, maintaining a similar margin.

Projected revenue for 2026 stands at €93.7 million, and adjusted EBITDA at €44.4 million, with an estimated 21% annual growth rate in operating cash flow from 2022 to 2026. The company noted that its performance could have been stronger without the ongoing war in Israel.

Growth drivers include increased ad sales, user conversion to paying ads, and traffic growth.

Yad2.co.il reportedly attracts 4 million unique visitors per month (Similarweb put its September traffic at 9.3 million), listing around 590,000 new ads monthly. The majority of revenue is from real estate (56%), primarily agencies and developers, followed by automotive (27%) and job listings via its subsidiary Drushim.co.il (15%).

Yad2 is operated by Aviv Group, which is based in Germany and was acquired by KKR as part of an $11 billion deal with Axel Springer. Its competitors include Facebook Marketplace, Agora.co.il and Homeless.co.il.

The AIM Group reached out to Yad2 for confirmation of the acquisition reports, but had not received a response by the time the story was published.

Online dealer Carvana posted another in a string of company firsts, achieving a profit on record revenue in Q3 2025 despite a cooling down in the used-car market. 

Carvana posted $5.65 billion in revenue, up 55% year-over-year and up from its previous record of $4.84 billion set the previous quarter. The company sold 156,000 vehicles, another record.

Carvana reported net income of $263 million, up $115 million y-o-y, though down from $308 million in Q2.

During an earnings call with investors, Carvana CEO Ernie Garcia III boasted that Carvana had profit margins more than two times the industry average and unit sales growth above 40% when other public retailers have been nearly flat.

“We remain the most profitable and fastest-growing automotive retailer,” Garcia said. “These data points are exciting in isolation. Achieving them simultaneously is rare and points to an exceptional future.”

Industrywide, used car wholesale sales were down slightly from Q2 and y-o-y, according to a study by Manheim, and Carvana felt it.

Gross profits per unit were down for both Carvana’s retail and wholesale businesses, which the company attributed to an expected drop off after tariff scares drove an outsized group of buyers to car lots in hopes of avoiding higher prices.

“We attribute that to some effects from the late March auto tariff announcements,” Carvana CFO Mark Jenkins said during a call with investors. “I think on the contrary, Q3 was a bit of a softer depreciation quarter on a year-over-year basis. I think we would attribute that almost an offset to the Q2 strength.”

Decline in per-unit profits was also due to an increase in advertising. After Carvana’s brush with bankruptcy in 2023, the company pared down its business and focused on efficiency, cutting out advertising almost entirely. 

In the last few quarters, it has recharged its marketing efforts. Advertising expenses increased by $139 per car sold in Q3, with expectations for Q4 spending to be equal or slightly higher.

That effort goes to one of three pillars of Carvana’s strategy: building understanding, awareness and trust. During a period of explosive growth and inadequate staffing during the pandemic, Carvana was the subject of lawsuits and state enforcement actions due to registration and titling problems (see here and here).

Improved registration processes are part of a R&D project that uses Phoenix as a test market.

Thanks to this project, 40% of customers in Phoenix receive their cars within a day of buying them online, versus a national average of 10%.

Phoenix is also a test market for more efficient finance verifications, vehicle staging, delivery scheduling systems, and staffing models, the company said.

Carro, a Singapore-headquartered digital automotive group and marketplace with operations across Southeast Asia, has posted SGD1.2 billion ($898 million U.S.) in revenue, up 15% year on year (y-o-y), for the 12 months to March 2025 (FY24-25).

Gross profit reached SGD149 million, up 20% y-o-y, the startup said in a news release. It reported EBITDA of SGD43 million for FY24-25 but didn’t say how this compared to FY23-24.

The company’s gross profit margin improved to 12.4% from 11.8% in FY23-24, which it said was underpinned by “margin expansion, ecosystem-led ancillary income growth and productivity optimization.” Ancillaries accounted for 55% of gross profit in FY24-25.

Among these ancillaries, Carro’s fintech business, Genie Financial Services, reported loan book growth of 35% y-o-y to SGD670 million in FY24-25. The company has continued to strengthen its fintech arm, recently teaming up with Hong Kong-listed fintech company SY Holdings to expand its auto financing services.

“As we grow our differentiated ecosystem-led business operating model, we continue to focus on driving marketplace margin expansion by cross-selling ancillaries to drive recurring income streams and improve customer lifetime value,” said Aaron Tan, co-founder and group CEO of Carro.

Tan revealed that Carro had scaled up operations in Hong Kong and Japan, venturing beyond its core markets in Southeast Asia. “This year, we launched our ‘brand new’ segment in Singapore and Malaysia to capture a broader customer base in the automotive value chain and are looking to bring this to other markets,” he added.

Last month, Carro raised $60 million U.S. in funding in a round led by the Japanese government-backed Cool Japan Fund. The company said the proceeds would be used to drive demand for Japan-based brands across the markets it operates in.

During the same month, Carro revealed plans to expand to Australia and pursue up to three M&A deals before the end of its current financial year. The planned expansion is part of preparations for a potential $500 million U.S. IPO next year, which could be a dual listing in the U.S., Singapore or Hong Kong.

On the product front, Carro recently launching an AI-enabled inspection app that combines on-board diagnostics with visual, sound and vibration analysis to improve its used-car inspection capabilities. “Our use of AI also stretches to sales conversion and customer service, which helps handle up to 85% of conversations and has cut down average response time by up to 80% to below 3 minutes in our largest markets,” Tan explained.

Carro has raised over $600 million U.S. in funding to date and has 5,000 employees across the Asia Pacific region. The company’s suite of services includes Carro Care (after-sales), Genie Financing Services and Coverro (insurance). It ended FY24-25 with a liquidity of SGD385 million.

India-based auto marketplace CarTrade Tech has posted INR1.9 billion ($22 million) in operating revenue for the three months to September 2025 (Q2 FY25-26), up 25.4% year on year (y-o-y), according to the company’s financial reporting. Its total income rose by 29% y-o-y to INR2.2 billion.

The revenue of its consumer vertical — comprising CarWale and BikeWale — grew by 37% y-o-y to INR762 million in Q2 FY25-26. The remarketing segment (auction businesses, including CarTrade Exchange) posted INR626 million in revenue, up 23% y-o-y. CarTrade said the remarketing business achieved an annualized run-rate of 1.8 million auction listings.

OLX India — which CarTrade acquired from Prosus in August 2023 — registered INR555 million in revenue in Q2, up 17% y-o-y, driven by “operating leverage and integration of synergies.”

CarTrade’s expenses in Q2 grew by 5.3% y-o-y to INR1.4 billion, with more than half of this attributed to employee benefits. Finance and depreciation and amortization costs were broadly flat y-o-y.

Accordingly, CarTrade posted INR640 million in after-tax profit for Q2 FY25-26, up 109% y-o-y. The consumer group and OLX India’s after-tax profit grew by 82% and 213%, respectively. The company’s EBITDA almost doubled y-o-y during the quarter (increasing by 94%), reaching INR636 million. The company closed Q2 FY25-26 with a cash balance of INR10.8 billion.

In line with its custom of allotting more shares under its employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) after financial disclosures, CarTrade approved the allotment of 187,800 equity shares of a face value of INR10 apiece to eligible employees under ESOP 2011, ESOP 2015, and ESOP 2021 (I) plans. As a result, the total paid-up share capital of the company grew to INR477 million.

CarTrade said that it attracted about 85 million average monthly unique visitors in Q2, with 95% of the traffic organic. It has a presence in more than 500 physical locations across India through Shriram Automall, CarWale abSure and OLX India franchisees.

In June, CarTrade launched CarTrade Labs, an innovation hub focusing on generative AI and data science.