Advised freenet, an alternative telecoms company, on the sale of its Strato web hosting business to Deutsche Telekom AG

Arma Partners is pleased to announce that it acted as exclusive financial advisor to freenet AG (DB: FNT) in relation to the proposed sale of its Strato webhosting business to Deutsche Telekom (DB: DTE) for a total consideration of €275m ($409m) in cash, which was announced on November 19, 2009. Strato AG provides webhosting and SaaS solutions to business and retail customers around Europe.

Closing of the transaction is subject to German Federal Cartel Office approval.

For the first 9 months of calendar 2009, freenet has reported revenues for its hosting business activities of c. €66m and EBITDA of c. €24m.

The disposal of Strato marks the continuation of freenet’s strategy to concentrate on mobile and mobile Internet. With the acquisition of debitel Group in July 2008, freenet became a leading mobile services provider with c. 19m subscribers and c. 20% of the overall German mobile market. In May 2009, freenet also announced the disposal of its DSL Internet access business.

The proposed sale of Strato is the fourth transaction on which Arma has worked with freenet, having advised on freenet’s €123m sale of its DSL business to United Internet AG (May 2009), its €1.6bn acquisition of debitel Group (announced April 2008) and its acquisition of Tiscali’s German broadband and narrowband contracts (January 2007).