One.com (‘the Group’), a leading European provider of web hosting services and domain names to a combination of private customers, small-to-medium enterprises (‘SMEs’) and small-office home-offices (‘SOHOs’), has today announced the acquisition of Digital Garden for an undisclosed consideration. This follows the acquisition of One.com by international private equity firm, Cinven in February 2019.
Established in 2014, Digital Garden is one of Norway’s leading web hosting businesses. Digital Garden was formed through the merger of UniWeb and FastName – both founded in the early 2000s – and provides domain names, web hosting and email hosting as well as a number of add-on products predominantly to SMEs.
Since their merger to form Digital Garden, both UniWeb and FastName are marketed as separate brands today. Digital Garden currently has three datacentres in Oslo, around 100,000 domain names and approximately 40,000 active customers. The combination of One.com and Digital Garden strengthens both companies‘ footprint in the Nordic region with an attractive brand and product offering targeting all customer types.
This transaction is evidence of One.com’s buy and build strategy, backed by Cinven, which is set to continue. With Cinven’s support, One.com is looking to grow both organically and through acquisitions into other geographic markets including its core geographic markets of the Nordics, Benelux, the UK and the DACH region (including Germany, Austria and Switzerland) as well as other strategic markets.
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“We are delighted to welcome Digital Garden into the Group. There is a natural fit and strong affinity between both businesses and we look forward to working together to continue One.com’s growth trajectory, increasing our offering and broadening our platform both in Norway and across the Nordic countries,” said Stephan Wolfram, Group CEO of One.com.
“Cinven has a strong track record of buy and build investment strategies, and significant experience of the web hosting services industry as part of our TMT team’s subsector focus,” said Thomas Railhac, Partner at Cinven.
He added, “In particular, during our ownership of HEG, the largest privately owned web services provider in Europe, Cinven strongly backed the organic and inorganic growth of HEG having completed 16 add-on acquisitions. We also plan to expand the One.com business through continued investment and further acquisitions. In addition, we intend to widen its offering and services to customers to further strengthen both One.com and Digital Garden’s customer proposition.”
