(Bloomberg) -- Groupon Inc., owner of a daily coupon website with 40 million subscribers, named Jason Child chief financial officer as it considers raising more money to fund growth.
Child, 42, previously served as Amazon.com Inc.’s vice president of finance, overseeing its $14 billion international business, Groupon said today in a statement. He will relocate to Chicago, where Groupon is based.
Groupon, which offers deals in more than 300 cities, spurned a $6 billion offer from Google Inc., people familiar with the negotiations said this month. The closely held company will top $500 million in sales this year, the people said, a milestone reached faster than Web pioneers Amazon, EBay Inc. and Yahoo! Inc.
“It’s a pretty clear signal that Groupon’s going to go public, and it’s probably in 2011,” Greg Sterling, an analyst at Internet2Go, an advisory service with Opus Research in San Francisco, said today in an interview. “I wouldn’t expect them, like Facebook, to hang out for a while.”
Child held various positions during his almost 12-year tenure at Amazon, including vice president of finance in Asia, finance director for Amazon.de in Germany and director of investor relations. Before joining Amazon, he worked for Arthur Andersen LLP as a consulting manager.
Groupon was introduced in November 2008 by founder Andrew Mason. The website offers daily group discounts on restaurants, theme parks, clothes and other consumer items.
Groupon aims to raise several hundred-million dollars, a person familiar with the matter said this month. The increased financing would value Groupon at less than $6 billion, said two people, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private. An investment group led by Digital Sky Technologies in April valued Groupon at about $1.3 billion.
LivingSocial, Groupon’s biggest rival, announced a $175 million investment from Seattle-based Amazon this month.
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