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Two months after Sulit.com.ph, which is now OLX Philippines, has pulled the plug on Pinoy Auto Trader, the talented team behind the site has regrouped to form their second automotive-centric website called AutoDeal.com.ph

If you guys can remember, Pinoy Auto Trader was acquired by Sulit back in July last year. But just six months in to the merger, Sulit decided to shut down the site for an undisclosed reason.

Although it was a tough pill to swallow for Daniel Scotts, Christopher Franks and the whole PAT team, it didn’t take long for them to bounce back and come up with their new site.

“Trying to find all the necessary information when purchasing a new vehicle can be incredibly difficult, which is why we’re working with industry leaders to collate as much data as possible so that we can be the central place Filipino’s come to online when they start the buying process. After-all it’s often pretty frustrating to find a promotion, only to find out it has expired.”

-Christopher Franks, co-founder of Autodeal.com.ph

“Frankie” and his team is banking on the same formula (Kick-ass layout + great contents + wide variety of car-related offerings) that they’ve used on PAT to make their new venture a success.

Mr. Franks says that although they’ve already seen “incredibly positive traction” from AutoDeal.com.ph despite only making its debut back in April, he and his team have more in store for Filipino car enthusiast in the coming months. So be sure to check out their Pinoy Auto Trader founders launch AutoDeal.com.ph appeared first on YugaTech | Philippines, Tech News & Reviews.

In a joint press conference yesterday, Sulit formally announced that it has acquired start-up company, Pinoy Auto Trader. The acquisition looks more like an acqui-hire considering that the new site is barely a year old in operation.

For a couple of years now, Sulit has been fiercely marketing their site in tri-media and tightly focused on several key verticals like “real estate” and “cars” (thus, a restructure of the site to create cars.sulit.com.ph as a landing portal).

It would look like Pinoy Auto Trader (PAT) was actually trying to get into the automotive market where Sulit already has a strong foothold. However, the execution done by PAT is more elegant and has a lot of rich content (it’s also a coincidence that the architects of PAT has strong SEO background which jives well with Sulit).

Sulit already captures a lot of traffic, and with ad money, they can even drive more traffic. PAT’s strengths is in design, rich content, architecture and a fresh approach at doing car classifieds. Combine both and you have a stronger portfolio. We still go by our initial theory that the acquisition was mostly driven to get all that raw talent from the PAT team.

Naspers, the investor and majority owner of Sulit.com.ph, has been shopping around for other sites and we’ve confirmed 2 years back that MIH was courting local car site Tsikot.com (see our story here) for a possible Php100 Million investment package (MIH is owned by Naspers; aggregates all media assets of Naspers).

With Tsikot out of the picture, Pinoy Auto Trader was in the right place and the right time. The entire PAT team is now housed at Sulit’s main office and will be getting more resources and manpower (they’re actually running Google Ads on this site).

The post Why Sulit bought Pinoy Auto Trader? appeared first on YugaTech | Philippines, Tech News & Reviews.