Contact: Scott Denne
Oakley Capital Investments unloads intergenia to an old friend. Host Europe, a Germany-based hosting and managed services provider that was owned by Oakley until 2010, is buying its competitor in a deal that values the target at $261m. The sale generates a 2.5x return to Oakley, which took a 51% stake in intergenia in late 2011 for $54m.
Past ownership isn’t the only thing that Host Europe and intergenia have in common. Both companies focus on German-speaking markets. Both have a large Web hosting business and are attempting to move upmarket with managed services and more SMB customers. And both have inked recent acquisitions in support of this move: intergenia nabbed internet24 in 2013 and Host Europe picked up a pair of companies that same year (domainFACTORY and Telefonica Germany Online Services) and, of course, intergenia today.
Despite the numerous small datacenter shops remaining and M&A growth across other sectors, 2014 hasn’t been a banner year for multitenant datacenter acquisitions in Western Europe. Only 36 firms in that region have been bought so far – compared with 29 in all of last year. And few transactions have been substantial. In fact, today’s deal is the largest purchase of such a company this year, according to The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase.
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