Their approach to internet startups — taking an idea that’s already been proven somewhere else (usually the US) and building out a copycat focused on Europe or emerging markets — either tends to draw admiration or disgust.

The swell of reactions to the rumor died down pretty quickly, but the background chatter is still there. And what I realized that when I looked back over people’s thoughts, that I hadn’t seen a clear-eyed overview of what it would actually mean if Rocket — or some of its properties at least — did hit the stock market.

That’s partly because everyone who comments on the Samwers comes from one of the two camps. Either they are emotionally invested in the idea of the brothers as tough operators who turn a profit (Venture Village quoted local investors happy about the possible influx of money). Or they have disdain for the kind of success the Samwers represent deep in their bones (Sarah Lacey, who has been a vocal critic of the Samwer brothers and their methods, said that “real entrepreneurs will never respect the Samwer Brothers”).

But if the question is “what would Rocket going public really mean”, in the end, neither position really does the question justice. So here’s a list of pros and cons I drew up.

It’s an exit, and any exit is good

The world is pretty economically distressed right now, and even inside the technology bubble — which took a while to feel the pain — things are tough. That makes any public offering a good thing, because it helps the effort to rebuild. And it wouldn’t just be hot air, either: Rocket has some powerful brands in its portfolio. Fashion retailer Zalando, which started off as a copy of Zappos, is growing fast with strong revenues north of $600 million.

It’s good news for Berlin, and for Europe

Berlin’s reputation as a home for interesting internet companies has been building over the last few years, and this move would certainly draw even more attention to it. More broadly, Europe could do with a win too. These have been bleak years for the continent, where most people still talk about Skype — first sold eight years ago — as one of the big successes. Of course, this kind of backslapping doesn’t come without drawbacks — success will inevitably draw more hangers-on, more poseurs, more wannabes, of which Berlin already has many. But it’s a welcome fillip for those who are still at the coalface, and could bring them more attention and assistance.

It shows the global market matters

All of the biggest internet companies are American — Google, Amazon, Facebook — and many of them are preoccupied with their home market, particularly if there’s an e-commerce or physical element to what they do. That’s understandable, but it does leave other markets waiting. Square’s a great example: it plans a global rollout soon, but the market wanted more, and so a wealth of copycats and rivals has built up. Underpinning Rocket’s success with an IPO could help reiterate the idea that you should think global.

It’s a paean to execution

You probably know the truism that floats around in the tech industry: ideas are ten a penny; execution is what matters. In fact, most people who say it don’t actually believe it, prizing the beauty of “innovation” just as highly. But strip all the blabbering away, and you can’t find a better example of execution than Rocket, where a ruthless dedication to success and speed is ingrained into each team.

It’s a big test for the Samwers

The Samwers haven’t really been this route before. Whether it’s the entirety of Rocket that goes public, or just one or two brands within it, this is unchartered territory for the trio. By and large they like to stick with what they know: take an idea, build, raise money, profit, start again. Going to the public markets with your business is a tough road that brings a lot of new challenges — and even when you look strong, you may struggle. We’ve already seen consumer internet IPOs struggle: Facebook stock is down 22 percent from its IPO.

Two other things to think about. First, remember that most of the financials behind Rocket’s businesses are obscured: we don’t know how well they’d stack up if opened up to shareholder scrutiny (although they’re pretty brutal with underperforming properties). Second, what evidence we have from the Samwers’ involvement in public companies is not great so far: Marc Samwer took over the international business at Groupon after it bought their clone, Citydeal, but left last spring amid turmoil at the company.

Most of the money won’t come back

Unlike startups which are built from scratch by their founders, who then often put money back into their local ecosystems as angels, the vast majority of the equity in Rocket companies is owned by the Samwers and their investors. The people who run Rocket startups are more like employees than founders, and as a result they won’t leave with as much cash as they would have done otherwise. It will also be interesting to see whether Rocket goes to New York or stays in Europe: some big Russian tech companies have chosen to IPO in London, but it seems likely that Rocket would pick the Nasdaq. That means it’s the American investment market that gets the deal.

And let’s remember, the investors who fuel Rocket’s empire aren’t likely to push all their profit back into the ecosystem either. Leonard Blavatnik of Access Industries has backed a few big companies — such as Deezer, the Spotify competitor — but has a very diverse portfolio, including oil companies, media businesses and chemicals. Swedish bank Kinnevik, meanwhile, seems to mainly get involved in funding Russian and German copycats.

There are some investors who are spreading the love: German media investment firm Holtzbrinck and Nordic venture business Sunstone are recent Samwer backers, for example. But it seems unlikely that either the biggest investors or the Samwer brothers themselves, who prefer to crush their rivals rather than buy them, will push too much of their cash back into.

It will encourage copycatting

Whatever you think about copycats, the fact is that there are smart, value-generating ways to build on the ideas of others — and then there are cheap, pointless imitations. Sometimes the Samwers achieve the former: when they bring, they deliver something that people want. What the Samwers’ critics misunderstand is that they are providing a service to people who do not have access to the original, often when the “parent” company shows no intention of expanding. It’s not as if large American internet companies have a divine right to the custom of the rest of the world, whenever they feel like it.

You could argue that they have single-handedly dragged Germany’s internet market out of the late 1990s by being aggressive and lifting ideas from elsewhere.

But sometimes they try to win with code lifted from rival sites who are already moving into the markets that Rocket is trying to brute force its way into (see Bamarang, its rip of Fab). They have also encouraged less capable entrepreneurs and investors to believe the copycat model is a way to surefire success. Just witness the clone wars springing up in difficult, exciting new markets like Russia or Turkey or Brazil or South East Asia. A Rocket IPO could give birth to a generation of poor imitations of American products that don’t understand where their value really lies.

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Billpay offers secure payment facilities for e-commerce stores, of which Rocket itself has many. And yes, it’s a clone of sorts, aping PayPal’s BillMeLater. Now the company’s latest financing round has brought on board an investor that’s fast becoming a familiar face round Rocket’s parts: Sweden’s Kinnevik. The exact figure hasn’t been disclosed, but it’s in the millions.

There have been ties between Kinnevik and the Samwer brothers for some time, as both used to be neck-deep in Groupon (Marc Samwer left his post as Groupon’s international chief in April, and Kinnevik sold its stake this month), but they seem to be getting constantly closer.

Kinnevik put $390 million into Rocket and its portfolio in the first quarter of this year alone. Then it participated in a $50 million round for interiors site Westwing earlier this month, alongside another Rocket regular, Holtzbrinck Ventures. Now the gang’s all back together for Billpay’s round.

We are pleased that we were able to broaden our investor base to Kinnevik,” Billpay CEO Nelson Holzner said. “We will use the new, significant resources to accelerate our growth.”

Growth doesn’t necessarily mean expansion into other countries, of course. After all, just weeks ago Billpay expanded its product portfolio to include a credit card and customer loyalty program – that alone warranted newer, bigger offices.

But this is Rocket we’re talking about, so expansion out of the German-speaking market would come as no surprise. And neither would further co-investments by the Samwers, Kinnevik and Holtzbrinck.

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It’s a significant return for Kinnevik, which invested just $2.9 million two years ago in German company MyCityDeal, shortly before it was purchased by Groupon.

But the exit could have been a lot higher had the Stockholm-based group been able to cash out around the time of Groupon’s IPO last November. Since then, amid controversy about its accounting procedures and heavy criticism of its sales tactics, the company’s shares have been on an almost constant slide.

That means by the time Kinnevik sold its 8.3 million shares, the stock price had fallen from 26.11 to just 9.74 — effectively drastically slashing what looked like a potential $190 million payday seven months ago by 60 percent. Getting out as early as they could suggests Kinnevik didn’t see the price going up any time soon.

The move is also significant because it severs another high-level connections between Groupon and MyCityDeal.

The German clone was set up by the notorious Samwer brothers in 2009 as a direct copycat of the Chicago-based company, and although it still acts as Groupon’s European arm, chief Marc Samwer left his post as Groupon’s international chief in April.

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Out goes Marc Samwer, the oldest of the three notorious Samwer brothers, who became head of outside the U.S. when his family sold their Groupon clone — the German-headquartered Citydeal — to the company in 2010.

In his place comes Austrian Veit Dengler, an executive who has served time at Dell, T-Mobile, McKinsey and Procter & Gamble. According to Crain’s Chicago, sales and marketing veteran Dengler has been brought in to help drive growth, with his predecessor moving to an advisory role.

Mr. Dengler, a native of Austria, will run Groupon’s overseas business from its international headquarters in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. With a business career stretching 25 years, including stints at Procter & Gamble, Mr. Dengler adds experience to Groupon, which has struggled to keep up with its hyper growth. He recently ran computer maker Dell’s Eastern European and Russian operations.

What that report misses, however, is that there’s a lot of important context that may have played a major part in this decision.

So why did Marc Samwer go?

Perhaps it was just time to move on: after all, two years after an acquisition is not unusual for an entrepreneur to earn out and head off to the next challenge. Marc Samwer has plenty going on with Rocket Internet.

But life at Groupon is pretty complicated right now.

The company finds itself embroiled in an accounting scandal — forced to restate its earnings after the discovery that it had understated operating expenses, an action that has prompted the SEC to consider an investigation.

Meanwhile the international business, which is responsible for around two thirds of the company’s revenue, has been finding itself under fire too.

Most notably, Groupon’s U.K. operation — which was brought in with the Citydeal purchase and reported to Samwer — has been censured by regulators after consumers filed so many complaints that it was found to have breached advertising codes a record 50 times in a single year.

After what the country’s financial watchdog called “widespread” problems, the company was told to fix a number of problems centered on the way it advertises offers, works with other businesses, and responds to customer complaints.

After an investigation that was started in December by the Office of Fair Trading — Britain’s equivalent of the Federal Trade Commission — the site was told that it had breached consumer regulations on a wide range of occasions and given a three month deadline to fix its wrongdoing, or face legal action.

“The investigation found widespread examples of Groupon’s practices which in the OFT’s view breached consumer protection regulations,” said the watchdog. ”The OFT has specific concerns over practices involving reference pricing, advertising, refunds, unfair terms, and the diligence of its interactions with merchants.”

That led Groupon to make a “commitment to customers” in which it promised to fix things. But critics have yet to be silenced.

Moving Marc, and his brother Oliver, into advisory roles will take them away from the leadership and decision making at Groupon — and although with around 6.5 percent of the company’s stock they will still be involved — it’s an interesting shift from the Chicago business.

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Plenty has been written about the Samwer brothers’ history, from early wins such as selling clones Alando and CityDeals to eBay and Groupon respectively, to more recent plays such as the Amazon knock-off Lazada.

But while many still think of Rocket as a European phenomenon that’s starting to break out elsewhere, the reality is that the company’s already running a vast number of properties all over the world.

It’s not easy to get a handle on all of Rocket’s babies, as the mothership doesn’t provide a comprehensive list. But this map shows all the countries where I’ve found Rocket to be either already operating or (in the cases of Slovakia, Hungary and Romania) about to open something.

We counted an astonishing 24 38 companies across 58 countries.

There are a couple of important things to remember here. Firstly, a huge amount of this expansion has only taken place in the last year or so. Secondly, there’s big money behind these operations – Zalando, for example, continues to pull in funding and is valued by some at around half a billion dollars. Thirdly, once Rocket has feet in a country it keeps using that infrastructure to swiftly roll out new services.

Not all countries have multiple Rocket operations. The map includes several countries where the only functioning Rocket offering I could find was the Airbnb clone Wimdu, namely Portugal, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay.

The map doesn’t include non-geographically-based Rocket products such as Pinspire (the Pinterest clone), or games operations Plinga and Panfu. I also left out Groupon, in which Rocket gained a stake through its CityDeals sale, but which could hardly be called a Rocket outfit.

Oh, and I also left out the Zalando redirect page in the Cook Islands, which I’m pretty sure is just there to rule out .co.ck jokes.

Here’s a breakdown of the operations shown on the map, in descending order of the number of countries in which each outfit is operating or about to open:

Update: This post was updated to add a number of companies that had been left off our initial survey.

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“I’m used to competition,” he tells me. “But these guys are getting more and more aggressive with what they’ve been doing.”

He’s talking about the arrival of DropGifts, a clone of Wrapp that appeared from the Samwers’ Rocket Internet factory last month. The launch struck me as a significant escalation by the German trio because it moved away from Rocket’s tried-and-trusted model of cloning successful American websites, and instead chose to target a months-old European startup with an interesting but largely untested business. Sure, Wrapp — which partners with retailers to let you give gifts to your friends through Facebook — has got some substantial investment and strong credentials … but it’s barely out of the starting gate.

Over the last few weeks, Wrapp’s team has had time to digest the news and work out what the appropriate response is. And their decision?

It’s time to come out with all guns blazing.

Speeding up

To begin with, the company’s entire roadmap has been moved forward. The site currently only operates in Sweden, but Winbladh says a slew of new territories will be added much faster than had previously been expected — we’re talking weeks, not months. This, he believes, should prevent DropGifts from being the first mover in most important markets.

“We don’t have the luxury of being able to wait,” says Winbladh. “So we decided to speed up since the Samwers started their blitz against us.”

And in order to fund that rapid growth, the company is also ready to speed up another part of its plan, turning back to investors to build up its warchest — despite having only closed the last $5 million of its Series A investment in January. Winbladh says that although this is not what he expected to be doing right now, it will not be difficult to move so rapidly to the next phase of financing.

“We will not have a problem raising a Series B,” he says. “We could have raised more before. And it’s not a coincidence that we have [board members] Reid Hoffman and Niklas Zennstrom behind us.”

Recently Rocket defended their approach in conversation with our Berlin reporter, David Meyer. DropGifts spokeswoman Mariko Schmitz and Dominik Richter of Rocket company HelloFresh said that although Wrapp “inspired” the German service, that was only part of the story.“Of course [DropGifts has] been inspired [by Sweden's Wrapp], but there’s a big movement on the internet about social gifting and companies linking into Facebook.”

“In my opinion, the real work begins when you’ve launched a concept and you follow it up, and you build something on top,” Richter added.

And while the bluntness of the copycat has clearly riled Wrapp’s team, they also seem to understand that the best way to outrun a copycat is to do a better job. And here is where they think they really have the jump on their rivals: strong existing relationships with partners, more big partnerships on the way, and a team that is focused on doing its job properly.

“It’s a free world,” Winblad said, “but we think in the long term it’s about driving innovation, building the best product and cooperating with retailers. And I’ve spoken to a lot of retailers, especially global brands, who want us to speed up.”

Some stores, he says, are being “aggressively pursued” by DropGifts salespeople, but many of them are subsequently approaching Wrapp to voice their concerns about the German business. And his belief is that the Samwer brothers will make poor partners for other businesses because of their track record and short-term outlook.

“What puzzles us is that it’s completely different from what they’ve done in the past, which is cloning retail businesses. We have to be aligned with retailers, not compete with them: it’s very important to us to run a neutral business,” he argues. “They’ve made a strategic mistake because you can’t be a competitor to retailers while also building something with them and sharing data with them.”

Ultimately, he says, the conflict between DropGifts and the rest of the Rocket empire could be its undoing.

“If you are a global brand, I don’t think you can build trust with somebody whose business is copying retail businesses. If I was a retailer, I’d be very concerned about working with the Samwer brothers. They could be very, very dangerous.”

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But is it now time to retire the idea that they just won’t talk?

Two major pieces in the last few days suggest that the three brothers — Marc, Oliver and Alexander — have decided to go on something of a press offensive.

First came Bloomberg Businessweek‘s “How Three Germans Are Cloning The Web”, a piece that hangs itself on the recent copycatting of Fab.com to give an overview of the Samwer’s main company-building vehicle, Rocket Internet. In it, Oliver Samwer goes on the record through a mixture of email and interview.

“There are pioneering entrepreneurs and execution entrepreneurs, and maybe we belong more to the execution entrepreneurs,” says Oliver, who speaks at a rapid clip, frequently punctuating thoughts with a rhetorical “ja?”

“I think the most admirable entrepreneurs are those with original ideas, ja? It’s a unique gift that you either have or you don’t. Just as we might have a very good gift of execution, others have a unique gift for the purest form of innovation.”

Meanwhile, a piece in the new edition of Wired UK, called Inside The Clone Factory, treads similar ground with a little more flourish. Written by Reuters journalist Matt Cowan, it’s obviously been several months in the making (it opens with an interview in Munich last September) and also tries to get to the bottom of what keeps them going.

“If I was motivated by money alone, I would have stopped a long time ago,” he [Oliver] insists. Rather, he suggests that what galvanises them is winning: “To prove over and over again that we’re the best,” he explains.

Both stories are good reads that give some insight into the brothers and into Rocket, and more or less go over the same ideas.

Both stories get to visit the offices of Rocket and discuss the company’s position in the fast-growing Berlin startup scene. And, ultimately, both stories manage to get the brothers (actually, mainly Oliver) to go on the record, even if it’s largely to share the same anecdotes or make the same points.

How much they add to your understanding of the Samwer brothers probably depends on how closely you follow Rocket’s movements.

The meta question is not about what these articles themselves say, or even what the Samwers say about themselves. It’s why they are appearing now. What do they hope to get from these interviews? Is it understanding? Legitimacy? Better press in general?

Whatever the case, the trio are obviously taking on a slightly new approach — and this feels like a watershed of sorts. After all, even though they really end up saying very little, well… at least they’re talking.

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