MeraSnap, the online photo printing & delivery service has been acquired for an undisclosed amount by Snapfish, the Indian arm of the global printing service from Hewlett Packard. As per this report in ContentSutra, the raison d’etre for the acquisition is the 100K users that MeraSnap has acquired over the last couple of years. MeraSnap was profiled on Webyantra in Sep2006. Its founders are the promoters of Knowledgeworkz, a Bangalore based information management consulting company. Congrats to them for pulling through this deal.

Snapfish has 200K users (as the report indicates), so that’s a straight 50% jump in the customer base for the company. That’s bang for the buck straightaway (notwithstanding how you define the users- accounts, active users, paying users, repeat users et al) In fact this is a customer acquisition and not a company acquisition, hence the MeraSnap team is not joining SnapFish. Interestingly enough the ContentSutra article seems to suggest that Snapfish had sniffed around other Indian players in this segment as well, and felt that Merasnap’s user base was larger than that of the other players (iTasveer, eYaadein, 123shots, Picsquare, RangeelaPhotos etc) in terms of repeat usage.

M&A activity in the Indian Web2.0 space has been few and far between. The other cases that come to mind are Bixee’s acquisition by IBIBO & Desimartini’s acquisition by HT Media. None of these examples are posters for Web2.0 M&A activity in terms of the size of the deal or its overall influence. The latter in fact was the subject of intense joking speculation as to the underlying motive. However one can’t question the logic behind these acquisitions from the viewpoint of the acquirers. I am sure they best know their business and are fully in control of what they are doing. The reasons may differ from case to case- sometimes the entire company may be getting acquired lock, stock & barrel; sometimes the real reason for the acquisition may be getting hold of the technology or just the user/customer base; at other times acquiring key personnel may be the biggest takeaway for the acquirer.