[London, ENGLAND] U.K. telecoms network operator Energis
announced Tuesday that it is paying US $719 million for
a 75 percent stake in Ision, a German Web hosting company
with operations across Europe.
Energis is purchasing most of its stake from Distefora,
the Swiss and German based information technology group that
currently owns over 13 million Ision shares.
Energis will also acquire over half a million shares from
Alexander Falk, the chief executive of Ision, and more
than a million from the company’s management and others.
The deal calls for Energis to pay 26 percent in cash
and 74 percent in new Energis shares, with completion
expected by the end of January 2001.
The acquisition of Ision will strengthen Energis’ operations
in Germany where the U.K. company already has an extensive
network. Ision brings a high quality client base and 800
complex hosted sites. It claims to account for 23 percent
of all page views in Germany.
Mike Grabiner, chief executive of Energis, pointed to
Ision’s strong sales channels throughout Germany and its
customer base and service capability as reasons for the
acquisition.
“Ision also has a broad range of Internet and related
services in five other European countries. Combined with
Energis Squared and our other continental European Internet
data centers, I believe this acquisition will make us the
largest Web hosting company in Europe,” said Grabiner.
Outside Germany, Ision operates data centers in Austria,
France, Italy, Holland and the U.K., its total space
equating to around 27,000 square feet. It employed
900 staff at the end of September, over half of them
skilled engineers and software technicians.
Ision’s revenues for the nine months to the end of
September were around US $60 million, but the company
made a loss during that period of US $10 million.
In the U.K., the Energis network is built along the National
Grid’s electricity pylon infrastructure. It operates
over 6,800 kilometres of fiber optic cable in the U.K.,
and provides voice, data and e-commerce services to
clients such as the BBC, Boots, Freeserve, Thomas Cook,
Sainsbury and Whitbread.
