Yahoo buy spawns e-commerce giant

One of the Middle East’s largest e-commerce companies has been created as a by-product of Yahoo’s acquisition of Maktoob, the region’s biggest internet portal.

While the US technology giant has bought the core Maktoob web portal, a number of businesses previously under the umbrella of the Maktoob Group have been spun off into a new company, to be managed by its co-founder, Samih Toukan.

“We will operate in a similar way to the old Maktoob group but the focus will be different, looking more at e-commerce, transactional businesses, things that nobody is doing enough of in the region,” Mr Toukan said.