Cupid seals a Valentine's Day deal to grow in US

The Scottish firm yesterday said it had paid $200,000 (125,000) from its own cash reserves for the site - which is mainly focused on the Asian Indian community in North America - along with several related web domains.

Cupid chief executive Bill Dobbie said: "We are very pleased to add IndianDating.com to our growing portfolio of dating websites.

"As a niche site, the domain fits in very well with our existing range and the acquisition represents our increasing presence in the North American market and growing international focus."

Dobbie said IndianDating had been run as a "lifestyle business" and although it was profitable, it would benefit from investment.

He said Cupid would bring the site on to its own platform, improve its customer service activities and market it more aggressively in both the US and India.

"It's very small now but in the medium term it should blossom quite nicely," he added.

The websites acquired have about 600,000 site members, mostly within the fast-growing Asian Indian population in the United States.

The acquisition does not involve any staff, but the seller has been retained as a consultant for six months.

Cupid has been wooing smaller niche websites and foreign operators with an eye to long-term relationships recently.

The Aim-listed company said in January that it was successfully integrating a string of acquisitions into the group.

The company - which changed its name from EasyDate after a spat with EasyGroup founder Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou - bought American website Flirt.com for about 800,000 in December.

The company took its new name from the US Cupid.com site it acquired for 4.4 million in September.Last year, it also paid 200,000 for lesbian dating site PlanetSappho.com and 25,000 for Spanish-language site Granamor, which is aimed at people looking to get married.

The Scottish group, which now has more than nine million customer members in 29 countries, hopes to earn a greater proportion of its revenues from abroad, and the US and India are among the markets it is keen to tap into.

Dobbie said IndianDating had not been advertised extensively in India due to the cost, but he believed it had the potential to grow there.

"We want to expand internationally and India is one of those targets, in the medium term," he added.

He said India was likely to become more interesting to the company as credit cards and other payment methods became more widely available there.

The European market for internet dating is currently worth some 460m a year, while in the US the market will be worth an estimated 1.3 billion a year by 2012.

Shares in the group last night closed up 2.5p or 2.2 per cent at 116.5p.

Cupid is due to report on its full-year results on 8 March.

In November, it revealed that revenue had been growing by more than 30 per cent during the first nine months of 2010.