(The price, however, is well below Zipcar’s value in April 2011, when it went public at $18 a share.)Īmong the beneficiaries will be Zipcar’s early investors, including the tech titan Steve Case. “At the same time, we are committed to retaining the elements of the Zipcar brand and culture that have allowed Zipcar to achieve such rapid growth and success.”Īvis paid $12.25 a share in cash, a 49 percent premium over the closing price of Zipcar on Monday. “Avis Budget’s existing infrastructure, scale and experience with managing multiple brands make it uniquely positioned to accelerate the growth and profitability of Zipcar,” Mr. Shares of Zipcar closed up nearly 48 percent, at $12.18.Īvis said it expected savings of $50 million to $70 million a year from combining the two companies. Shares of Avis Budget Group closed up about 5 percent on Wednesday, at $20.77. Avis’s rivals, Hertz Global and Enterprise Rent-A-Car, already offer hourly rental services that compete with Zipcar. He said he had come to the realization that car sharing could complementĪvis’s more traditional car rental business and help it unlock new business opportunities abroad and with younger consumers. Nelson said Wednesday morning in a phone call with analysts. “I’ve been somewhat dismissive of car sharing in the past,” Mr.
Nelson, the company’s chairman and chief executive, who had resisted entering the Zipcar, which will operate as a subsidiary of Avis, should realize significant savings on things like vehicle purchases and insurance, while being able to tap Avis’s fleet to meet demand on weekends, when itįor Avis, the purchase represents a new direction in a fiercely competitive car rental market, and an about-face for Ronald L. November that it would post an annual profit for the first time). Becker said.įor Zipcar, based in Cambridge, Mass., the deal represents perhaps an inevitable evolution for a company that has been more successful as a collectivist concept than as a profit-making venture (though it announced in Other “Zipsters,” as Zipcar customers are known, worried that the company’s communal cachet could be tarnished by a corporate behemoth. Long After the I.P.O., Deals at a Discountīut on Wednesday, Avis Budget Group, the car rentalĪnnounced that it was buying Zipcar for about $500 million.