Poised for IPO, Kayak Reports Sales Boost and Global Growth

Updated registration offering, Kayak reported that its first-quarter revenues totaled $53 million, growing 43 percent since the year-ago period.

In addition, it disclosed it acquired a travel metasearch company in Austria for $9.5 million. The company, which has a ridiculously long name, operates as JaBo Software for short and can be found at www.checkfelix.com. (If you don’t believe me, the full name is JaBo

Vertrieb-und Entwicklung GmbH.)

The Norwalk, Conn.-based company, which originally filed its IPO papers in November, is seeking to raise roughly $50 million.

Its first-quarter results also included a net loss of $4.5 million, which is mostly attributable to a non-cash expense of nearly $20 million. The expense was related to the discontinuation of the SideStep brand name and Web site. The migration from SideStep to Kayak.com occurred in January.

The filing also reflected the Norwalk, Conn.-based company’s stronger focus on the international market. Kayak reported spending $9.5 million on its April 1 acquisition of JaBo Software, described in the filing as a “leading travel metasearch website in Austria.” It looks like the JaBo buy was just one part of a larger global growth strategy: International operations accounted for 14 percent of Kayak’s revenue in the first quarter of 2011, up from eight percent in the first quarter of 2010, the company reported. Kayak, which opened its European headquarters in Zurich last month, now expects its international revenues to increase at a faster rate than its sales in the U.S., according to the filing.

Kayak’s report of impressive growth comes at a good time for the IPO-bound company, as the Internet industry is on a roll with solid stock market debuts. Last week, professional social networking site LinkedIn listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange to impressive demand, more than doubling its share price on the first day of trading from $45 to a close of $94.25. And Russian search engine Yandex raised $1.3 billion in an IPO on the Nasdaq exchange earlier this week, representing the biggest public offering for a dotcom since Google’s listing in 2004. While Memorial Day usually represents the start of a pretty sleepy time for the stock market, the summer of 2011 could shape up to be a busy one.

It also reported that its mobile applications have been contributing to more of its business. In all, the apps have been downloaded about seven million times since their introduction. In the first quarter alone, the apps were downloaded one million times and accounted for 12 percent of the company’s total queries.