Online recommendation site Yelp (
YELP
) recently expanded into Turkey, one of the largest economies in
Europe. This move comes after its launch in Poland in late
October. Yelp's efforts will initially be concentrated in
Istanbul even as the full-featured site will be available to all
Turks across the country and will support English, Danish, Dutch,
French, Finnish, German, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish,
Polish and Turkish, providing users access to local insights in any
one of these twelve languages.
The Polish site will initially concentrate on Poland's
capital Warsaw and the cultural capital of Krakow before
expanding to the rest of Poland. It will also open up the market to
nearly 20 million Poles living outside the country.
Yelp generates revenue mainly from local business advertising,
display advertising and from additional services like Yelp deals,
and deals with reservation services like OpenTable (
OPEN
). The site features services such as business search, review and
recommendations on local businesses and enables customers to access
ratings and read reviews and opinions about local hotels,
restaurants, dentists and mechanics, etc. Local businesses are
reviewed and rated by customers who become contributors to the
website.
Check out our complete analysis of Yelp
Europe Growth Continues
Turkey and Poland have fared reasonably well compared to many of
its European neighbors following the debt crisis that is still
gripping Europe and is a key factor for Yelp's expansion into the
country. People will be able to create accounts on Yelp's local
site to provide feedback, reviews and share opinions about local
businesses and services. Yelp's iPhone and Android applications
will be available as well as its free suite of business owner
tools: Yelp for Business Owners. This makes Poland the nineteenth
country in the world to have access to Yelp.
Yelp's Challenges
Currently, an estimated 25% of unique users come from mobile
phones, and Yelp mobile applications are being used on 7.2 million
devices each month, up 70% year-over-year. Yelp does not run any
ads on its mobile app and has no monetization through this
platform. As it expands into the rest of Europe, we expect more
traffic from the mobile app in the future. Yelp
supports English, Danish, Dutch, French, Finnish, German,
Italian, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish, and we expect more local
language integration if its European expansion is successful.
We currently have a
$15 Trefis price estimate
for Yelp, which is nearly 50% below its current market price.
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a Company's Products Impact its Stock Price at Trefis