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Official data show effects of Chinese domain investment bonanza

by — Domain Registrars 1 Comment

What happened in December, the one year anniversary of the Chinese investment bonanza.

ICANN just published data from Verisign about .com activity in December.

This was the one year anniversary of lots of Chinese speculative registrations, and the deletions were massive.

eName had 794,258 domains delete. HiChina saw 532,231 names delete. 22net had 125,766 deletions.

These numbers were significantly higher than November for eName and HiChina, but lower for 22net.

Now, let’s look at how the registrars fared with new registrations and transfers in December: Click here to see the charts…

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Chinese registrars lose of lot of .com, but HiChina picks up domains from others

by — Domain Registrars 2 Comments

Official data from November show some interesting domain movement.

ICANN just published data from Verisign about .com activity in November. This was right in the thick of the anniversary of the “Chinese surge” and the data show it.

GoDaddy has the most expired deletions because it’s the biggest, but check out these huge deletion numbers at Chinese registrars:

22net 339,307
eName 315,143
HiChina 265,138

I imagine these numbers increased in December, but we’ll have to wait a month to find out.

You’ll see below that HiChina also had massive inbound transfers, and conversely, eName and 22net lost a lot. So it appears HiChina picked up some domains from them. Maybe it was an investor buying out other investors?

Now, let’s get to the normal charts that I track each month for .Com Winners & Losers… Click here to see the charts…

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eName is now a public company

by — Domain Registrars 1 Comment

Chinese domain name company goes public.

eNameFour months ago I wrote that Chinese domain name company eName was going public. As of yesterday, the company is now publicly traded.

China consultancy Allegravita has translated eName’s press release about going public. You can read the translation in full here (pdf).

Some highlights include:

– at year-end 2015, domain registration income was CNY215 million, taking up 82.94% of income, while domain exchange income was CNY44 million or 17.03%.
– domain registrations increased nearly 7x last year compared to 2014
– the company plans to expand into additional intellectual property services such as trademarks

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Breaking: eName announces Initial Public Offering

by — Domain Registrars 5 Comments

Chinese domain name company announces IPO.

enameeName has announced its plans to go public, following the merger/acquisition of 4.cn earlier this year.

The company had 2015 revenue of 260 million(CNY) ($40 million USD) and net income is 27.9 million(CNY) ($4.3 million).

That compares to 2014 revenue of 168 million(CNY) ($26 million USD) and net income of 11.9 million(CNY) ($1.8 million USD).

Chairman Dejing “Meatball” Kong owns 68.8% of the shares.

The company will trade on a secondary, smaller market similar to the London AIM (where Centralnic and MMX are traded).

(Hat tip: Simon Cousins with Allegravita)

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Breaking: eName acquires 4.cn

by — Services 35 Comments

eName now listed as sole shareholder of GoldenName entity.

Consolidation in the Chinese domain name market has begun.

Based on a Chinese corporation document and discussions with industry sources, Domain Name Wire has confirmed that eName now owns domain marketplace 4.cn.

Sources tell Domain Name Wire that DN.com and other properties under the GoldenName umbrella are included in the deal, although I haven’t been able to confirm this from official documents.

A source says the deal can be considered more of a merger than an acquisition.

For its part, DN.com company representatives have denied an acquisition. After DN.com went down last week due to an ownership transfer, a company representative posted a carefully worded explanation on NamePros, stating:

Please understand that taking down www.DN.com temporarily was a prerequisite move if we wanted to modify the entity. We did this to coordinate with the lawful procedures.

For you to understand it better, we’d like to explain the exact procedures that we need to go through. We hope everyone can take an objective perspective over this. The official term is called “备案（bei an）”. “备案（bei an)” is to register the website and the company with the government’s network authority, in which procedure we report to the government about what the website’s business is and which company the website belongs to. It is because of our development plan, that we are changing the entity from “Hangzhou Midaizi Network Co., Ltd.”(also the mother company of 4.cn) to “Hangzhou YunBiao Intellectual Property Agency Co., Ltd.” Both companies belong to John Xu, 4.cn owner.

Although John Xu is still named on a Chinese corporation document for “Hangzhou Midaizi Internet Limited”, a Chinese company search shows that eName is the only shareholder. Records show that the ownership of the entity changed on March 3.

A DN.com company representative again denied the company was acquired in a comment on Domain Name Wire. I reached out to DN.com customer support this morning for a comment about the company search showing eName as the owner of Hangzhou Midai.

It’s possible that there are technicalities around the ownership, which is perhaps why DN.com was moved to a different entity than the one that owns 4.cn, but sources believe the transaction includes DN.com and other affiliated sites.

This is a developing story, and I should have more insight later today.

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