German Internet service provider, United Internet has agreed to buy web hosting business Strato from Deutsche Telekom for around €600 million ($629m) in cash.
Based in Berlin, Strato employs over 500 people with operations mainly in Germany and the Netherlands and over 2 million customer contracts. Strato’s annual revenue for fiscal year 2016 is forecasted to be around EUR 127 million with anticipated EBITDA 2016 of around EUR 48.5 million.
The Strato product portfolio ranges from domains, e-mail packages, complete website packages, webshops, servers, to online storage and individual high-end hosting solutions.The business operates from the company’s two own high-performance data centers in Berlin and Karlsruhe.
US-based web hosting giant, Godaddy acquired Host Europe Group (HEG) earlier this month. Both United Internet and Deutsche Telekom had also been interested in HEG, but decided to pursue their own deal instead.
Ralph Dommermuth, CEO of United Internet
The acquisition of Strato will enable us to expand our leading market position in the European hosting and cloud application business and drive the consolidation of a market which is currently still strongly fragmented.
Dr. Christian Böing, CEO of Strato
The cultures of the two companies fit perfectly together. We will use the resulting potential and synergies from the combination to drive growth in the hosting market and offer our customers even better products.
