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NCC buys Open Registry for up to $22.6m — a gTLD registry now owns part of the TMCH
Kevin Murphy,
January 20, 2015, 18:28:08 (UTC),
Domain Registries
NCC Group has acquired registry back-end provider Open Registry in a deal that could be worth as much as £14.9 million ($22.6 million).
The deal means that NCC, which runs the new gTLD .trust via subsidiary Artemis Internet, now owns a back-end, a registrar and a piece of the Trademark Clearinghouse, in addition to its original core domain business of providing data escrow services to registries.
According to NCC, the acquisition is for a minimum of £7.9 million ($12 million), with the rest to be paid over three years if Open Registry meets performance targets.
Open Registry had revenue of €3.7 million ($4.3 million) in 2014, turning a profit of €15,000 ($17,300).
Its core business is as a back-end provider for new gTLD applicants. It has about 20 on its books, mostly European dot-brands and cities.
Part of the company’s business is CHIP, the Clearinghouse of Intellectual Property, which along with IBM and Deloitte runs the ICANN-sanctioned TMCH, which all new gTLD registries must use in their Sunrise and Trademark Claims launch periods.
It also owns a small registrar, Nexperteam, which has about 8,000 domains under management.
The Benelux company employs eight people.
Open Registry’s founding CEO Jean-Christophe Vignes joined Artemis as head of domain operations in 2013.
As an overall responsible for the TMCH, I would like to put some things in perspective on this article. The set-up of the TMCH is as follows (and this is public info since this was published by ICANN months ago): ICANN has mandated/contracted Deloitte for 5 years to operate the “front-end” of the TMCH (project management, sales, validation etc); ICANN mandated/contracted IBM to operate the underlying database. ICANN remains the owner of the database. Deloitte has subcontracted IBM to support the technical operations of the front-end and CHIP as a billing/contracting agent and website operator. As such, CHIP, now part of NCC group does not “own” a part of the TMCH.
It’s also of notice that the mentioned registrar, Nexperteam, is not ICANN-Accredited, but a reseller of another company of the DCL Group that owned OpenRegistry and CHIP, EuroDNS. The mentioned domains could be ccTLDs where they might have their own accreditation, resold gTLDs or a bit of both.
Interesting indicator of the value of backend registries. 1,300>1 ratio on profit.
NCC just agreed to sell Open Registry for a mere €3.75 million (approximately USD $3.95 million):
http://irservices.netbuilder.com/ir/ncc/newsArticle.php?id=2016700&ST=NCC
It looks like NCC Group shareholders are yet another victim of ICANN’s new gTLDs program.