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MarkMonitor to change hands in $3.55 billion deal

Kevin Murphy, July 11, 2016, Domain Registrars

MarkMonitor owner Thomson Reuters is to sell of its IP division, which includes the brand-protection registrar, to private equity in a $3.55 billion all-cash deal.
The company said it will sell its Intellectual Property & Science business Onex Corporation and Baring Private Equity Asia.
MarkMonitor is of course a small part of that division. It also includes its Web of Science, Thomson CompuMark, Thomson Innovation, MarkMonitor, Thomson Reuters Cortellis and Thomson IP Manager services.
The unit reportedly has 4,000 employees and $1 billion in annual revenue.
Thomson Reuters said it will use $1 billion of the sale price to buy back shares and the rest to pay off debts.
The company revealed plans to get rid of the unit last November. Analysts said it was not core to its growth strategy.
Thomson Reuters acquired then privately held MarkMonitor for an undisclosed sum in 2012.

Melbourne IT gets out of brand protection with $157m sale to CSC

Kevin Murphy, March 12, 2013, Domain Registrars

Corporation Service Company has acquired Melbourne IT’s flagship digital brand management service for a ridiculously expensive AUD 152.5 million ($157m).
The shock news takes Melbourne out of the high-margin defensive registration and brand monitoring market, leaving it as a basic domain registrar focused on small businesses.
For CSC, the deal leaves it with a considerably strengthened hand in the DBS space, which is poised to benefit from the massive influx of new gTLDs over the next few years.
It also means that all of the over 100 new gTLD applications Melbourne was supporting as a consultant will now be managed by CSC.
The price of AUD 152.5 million is far more than Melbourne IT could have hoped to ask for, equal to almost its entire market capitalization of AUD 160 million.
Melbourne has had a rocky time on the markets of late, and had previously disclosed that it was looking to sell off some units in order to appease shareholders and rationalize its business.
But DBS was considered a core business, bigger now than Melbourne’s regular domains business, and likely not for sale. CSC’s high-premium offer was too good, it seems, to be responsibly refused.
“While this was not a business that we had specifically earmarked for sale, given the value creation provided by the transaction, this was an opportunity which could not be ignored,” CEO Theo Hnarakis, said in a statement.
The deal follows the sale of MarkMonitor, a key Melbourne competitor, to Thomson Reuters last July. When it comes to brand protection in the domain name space, it’s a big boy’s game nowadays.
Melbourne will remain a domain registrar with over four million names under management.
The DBS business was formed in 2008, largely as a result of Melbourne’s purchase of Verisign’s brand services division for $50 million.

Thomson Reuters buys MarkMonitor

Kevin Murphy, July 26, 2012, Domain Registrars

Thomson Reuters has acquired the corporate brand-protection registrar MarkMonitor for an undisclosed sum.
MarkMonitor will be absorbed into its new owner’s Intellectual Property & Science business unit, giving it a ready-made and pretty strong domain name management capability.
San Francisco-based MarkMonitor has almost 700,000 domain names in gTLDs under management and says it has over half of the Fortune 100 as clients and over 400 employees.
Thomson Reuters is one of the world’s leading providers of business information with annual revenue approaching $14 billion.
As an aside, I predicted back in October 2011 that MarkMonitor was about ready to be acquired, based on the consolidation trend in the industry. It took a little longer than I expected.