Japan’s NTT Com Buys Majority Stake In German Data Centre Provider

Competition in the European data centre market is heating up, with Japanese firm NTT Com agreeing to purchase a majority stake in German data centre provier E-shelter for €742m (£539m).

NTT will acquire 86.7 percent of the German provider’s shares. The acquisition will place the NTT Com group into the number three three position for data centre space in Europe, the firm said.

Expand

E-shelter CEO Rupprecht Rittweger said that the move comes as the firm’s multinational customers look to expand beyond EU orders.

Rittweger said: “To meet their demands ahead of our competitors, we believe that the best way to ensure e-shelter’s growth and development is in partnership with NTT Com, which has a commanding presence in Asia and is a leading provider of ICT services worldwide. At the same time, we look forward to strengthening NTT Com’s global ICT infrastructure and market share with our strong presence in Europe.”

The move will also strengthen NTT Com’s European grasp in a data centre market that is growing 9 percent per year, according to Gartner.

E-shelter currently manages 90,000m² of data centre space in four cities across Germany, as well as space in Zurich, Switzerland and Vienna, Austria. The company’s Campus Frankfurt 1 is one of Europe’s largest data centres with 60,000m² of space.

Merger

Last month, data centre providers Telecity and Interxion agreed to a merger, with the deal bringing strengths of both firms to the “geographic needs” of their customers in Europe.

Combined, both firms now have a net value of £600m. The firms cited demand for cloud services and data centres was the catalyst for the deal.

Interxion CEO David Ruberg said: “Bringing together the assets and solutions offered by Interxion and Telecity will improve our customers’ ability to realise the benefits of transitioning to the cloud.”

E-shelter is a clever little name for a data centre provider isn’t it? Take our quiz of tech names here to see if you know about some others!