Advised LDC on its acquisition of a majority stake in leading web hosting provider UK2 Group

Arma Partners is pleased to announce that it acted as exclusive financial adviser to Lloyds TSB Development Capital (“LDC”) on its acquisition of a majority stake in leading web hosting provider UK2 Group (“UK2”), for £47m, in partnership with its management team.

Established in 1997, UK2 has evolved into a leading international provider of domain name registration, shared, dedicated and Cloud hosting services to customers globally through multiple brands, delivered from data centres in the UK and the US.

UK2 has an industry-wide reputation for innovative hosting products. Through the VPS.NET brand, UK2 offers virtual private server Cloud hosting to the mass market and today is the fourth largest true public Cloud provider in the world. Through the 100TB brand, UK2 offers dedicated servers with market leading quantities of bandwidth.

This transaction highlights Arma Partners’ continued priority focus on the web hosting sector, building on our previous involvement in the sale of Strato to Deutsche Telekom. Our ongoing activity in the sector has given us very high levels of visibility on the key value drivers for hosting providers and on the identity and objectives of the main buyers who will drive the ongoing consolidation of the hosting sector in Europe.

This is Arma Partners’ second transaction for LDC, following our work on the acquisition of Easynet from BSkyB and reinforces Arma Partners’ strong execution skills and tradition of repeat business with key clients.