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Tesco Takes Another Hit
Having lost about half of its market value in a year and facing a Financial Conduct Authority investigation on suspicion cooking its books, Britain’s biggest supermarket chain is about to take another hit over the sale of its music streaming service.
Screenshot from California.
The Financial Times has reported Tesco is in the process of selling Blinkbox Music for “a fraction” of the £12 million it paid for it in 2102.
In fact the FT reckons Tesco will get less than the £5 million that a week ago TalkTalk paid it for Blinkbox Movies.
Tesco is selling Blinkbox Music to Guvera, an Australian company that runs an online music streaming service throughout Asia.
Blinkbox and Guvera both let users listen to free music, hoping that advertising will provide the revenue stream. Tesco’s alliance with Blinkbox was another disaster for the retail giant, which has admitted fiddling with its figures to report better trading results.
It bought Blinkbox from We7 and spent two years investing millions into it. The FT says that its made a loss of £4.5 million on a turnover of just £300,000 in the year to February 2013.