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Donuts to pay $213 million for Rightside
Kevin Murphy,
June 14, 2017, 12:39:00 (UTC),
Domain Registries
Donuts is to acquire Rightside for $213 million, the companies have just announced.
The $10.60 per share cash offer represents a 12% premium over Rightside’s average closing share price over the last 30 days. Rightside’s 52-week high is over $12.
Just one year ago, Donuts offered $70 million for Rightside’s portfolio of gTLDs, but was shot down.
Rightside also turned down a $5 million offer for four gTLDs from XYZ.com in April 2016.
The $213 million offer is funded at least partly by Silicon Valley Bank, which is providing a credit facility to Donuts.
Assuming the deal closes — which will require the holders of more than half its shares to agree to the price — it will make Rightside a private company once more, as a wholly owned Donuts subsidiary.
The two gTLD registries are already partners, with Rightside providing domain registry services for Donuts’ roughly 200 new gTLDs.
There was talk of a split last year, with Donuts apparent endorsement of Google’s Nomulus platform, but the two companies reaffirmed their relationship earlier this year.
Rightside itself has a portfolio of 40 gTLDs, but it’s faced criticism from shareholders over the last year or so over their relatively poor performance.
Activist investor J Carlo Cannell, who owns almost 9% of Rightside, has been pressuring the company’s board to take radical action for the last 15 months.
Earlier this year, Rightside got out of the once-core wholesale registrar game by selling eNom to rival Tucows for $83.5 million.
Wow. First Enom to Tucows, now Rightside to Donuts…
So what is left now?
Worst news ever for domaining!
Why is that ? The only change is that they are now vertically-integrated with a registrar.
Seems that Donuts will not use Nomulus in the end.
Whether or not they will maintain their own platform or switch to Nomulus is still a decision they can make…
This is start of Strong base for nGTLD’s future.
Now For sure Donuts is future takeover target by Verisign or Godaddy. Its too big to ignore now.
I think Verisign would have a hard time getting that past regulators.
good point but at the end its all about survival of the fittest
just watch, Very soon Uniregistry and .xyz will join Donuts.
Hard to see unireg & XYZ staying as they are, either they will merge or get bought out
Sold for scraps. Guess the top line revenue agenda never worked out.