BREAKING : Telkom's Metra signs Joint Venture deal with eBay to save Plasa

We just received news that one of Telkom's subsidiary company Metra is signing a partnership agreement with eBay early today in Jakarta. Both company agreed to establish another company (Joint venture) that will handle Plasa's operations while Metranet, the current company running Plasa will shift its focus on running news portal PlasaMSN.

We also heard that both Metra and eBay (represented by the Korean office) agreed to establish another company with majority shares owned by Metra (60%) and eBay with 40%.

We have sniffed rumors about Telkom spinning off Plasa for eBay but apparently the deal didn't get through as planned. Before that, eBay already setup their office in Jakarta in anticipation for expanding their business in the country and talked further with Telkom about the possibility of strategic partnership. We heard that both Metra and eBay failed to reach agreement on Plasa's valuation for the acquisition deal. So the deal went off.

With Plasa moving a bit slow for the past month, it seems obvious that some drastic and strategic move need to be made in order to save the e-commerce company. Plasa itself was backed by Telkom and received around $4 million in funding to promote their service as well as educating the local marketing about the benefits of e-commerce for both merchants and consumers.

We will update this news once we received more info.