Australian Melbourne IT plans to acquire WebCentral

May 22, 2006 - Melbourne IT announced today that they have entered into an agreement to buy WebCentral. This would bring together two of Australia’s most powerful domain and hosting companies.

Australian-based Melbourne IT has international reach and provides domain registration services for Yahoo! Small Business and Microsoft Office Live, among others, while WebCentral is Australia’s largest hosting provider. The merged company would have approximately 400 employees worldwide and combined annual sales of over $130 million.

“The proposed acquisition will bring together two of Australia’s leading web-services businesses, generating significant benefits for customers, shareholders and staff of both companies,” said Theo Hnarakis, CEO and Managing Director of Melbourne IT.

Melbourne IT has been rising steadily on the Australian Stock Exchange over the last six months (chart), while the WebCentral stock price has experienced a significant decline (chart). This could be a motivating factor for the deal to take place at this time, at least from WebCentral’s perspective.

WebCentral shareholders will vote about the acquisition in a meeting that will likely be held in August 2006.

For more information, please contact;
Peter Alguacil, Ipwalk AB, +46-21-124248, peter@ipwalk.com

About Ipwalk:
Ipwalk is a global information company providing statistics based on a continuously updated database. Ipwalk is processing and analyzing more than 60 million domain names and 50 million IP addresses on a daily basis. This information is provided through the Ipwalk.com website and through customized trend reports. For more information, visit http://www.ipwalk.com.