LONDON (Alliance News) - Top-level domain company CentralNic Group PLC on Tuesday said it has agreed to acquire Australia-based Instra Group and will back the deal with a share placing.
CentralNic said it will pay a total of AUD33.0 million to acquire Instra, a privately-owned domain name retailer, consisting of AUD30.0 million in cash and AUD3.0 million in CentralNic shares.
CentralNic itself makes money by selling domain names. It said the acquisition will boost its overall capabilities and market exposure, in addition to increasing its retail offering. Melbourne, Australia and Napier, New Zealand-based Instra supplies customers with domain names for over 150 country codes, equivalents of .co.uk.
In addition, CentralNic said it will raise around GBP10.0 million via a share placing through Zeus Capital and Peel Hunt. It will issue a total of 25.0 million shares at 40.00 pence per share. Taken together, the placing shares and the consideration shares will represent around 31% of CentralNic's issued share capital upon completion.
CentralNic also said it has signed a premium domain name sales agreement for a number of names in its portfolio, under which it will sell the names for a total of USD3.6 million in cash, which will be used in part to back the Instra acquisition too.
"This has been a year of growth for CentralNic from both an operational and financial perspective, and this deal is transformative for the group as we continue on our growth strategy. Instra Group is a fast growing, robust and global business and we look forward to integrating Instra into CentralNic," said Ben Crawford, CentralNic's chief executive.
"This acquisition will grow our current revenues by 70% and extend our retail capabilities to serve customers in the fast growing emerging markets, globally," Crawford added.
Separately, CentralNic said it has appointed Iain McDonald to its board as a non-executive director. McDonald is an advisor to financier Bill Currie's private family office William Currie Group.
By Sam Unsted; samunsted@alliancenews.com; @SamUAtAlliance
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