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EuroTrust Continues Company Transformation Adam Eisner, theWHIR.com
From Web Hosting Monthly, November 2003 edition
December 5, 2003 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The sale of EuroTrust's (eurotrust.dk) secure Web hosting unit marks the end of an era for a company that has dabbled in many industries and continues to adjust its business focus.
On October 22, the Denmark-based company said it had completed the sale of its Web hosting subsidiary, which provides a wide range of secure hosting services aimed at small to medium-sized businesses, to Mondo, a Danish IT company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though according to EuroTrust's 2002 annual report filed in September, the company had some 11,000 secure hosting clients.
The announcement signaled the end to one of EuroTrust's many transformations. Initially, the firm compiled and sold directories of administrative information on Scandinavian companies. In 1996, the company entered into an agreement with WorldCom to offer telephone services, but dropped out of the phone business when price competition made the business intensely difficult to succeed in. Because the Internet was rapidly growing in popularity, the firm started providing consumers and small businesses with access, hosting, domain registration, security and online intellectual property rights services.
In 2000, EuroTrust became a VeriSign affiliate for the purpose of distributing VeriSign products and services in western Europe, including managed public key infrastructure services, digital certificates and application acceleration services. During this time the company also renamed itself to euro909.com, and in June 2001 the company sold its corporate domain name business to VeriSign.
Later that same year, EuroTrust's transformation continued. The company merged Digiweb, its secure hosting division, with DHT Hosting ApS, a Denmark-based hosting firm, to create EuroTrust Secure Hosting. The services were aimed at small to medium-sized Scandinavian firms that could not afford to host their secure applications and services in-house. Although Digiweb was not profitable at the time, "merging with DHT and thereby implementing state-of-the-art automated hosting systems has turned EuroTrust Secure Hosting into a profitable company," EuroTrust said at the time of the sale announcement last month.
Today, the company says its core business focus is on security. Through its continued association with VeriSign, EuroTrust sells a wide range of security products, and also provides security-related consulting and training. The firm emphasized its stated focus on October 28, when it announced that it had sold EuroTrust NetVaulting A/S, its remote back-up services firm, to Danish IT services company Munk IT A/S for an undisclosed sum. "EuroTrust NetVaulting is one the longest existing remote back up businesses in Denmark and has many high profile costumers in a market that is set to boom," Brian Mertz Pedersen, chief operating officer of EuroTrust, said at the time of the sale.
Ian Gilson, who used to follow the company as an analyst for investment banking and institutional research firm L.H. Friend Weinress, Frankson & Presson before moving to Roth Capital, says the company likely left the space at least in part because of the infrastructure requirements needed to grow a hosting operation. "If you can't grow," he says, "why stay in the business?"
Despite the fact that EuroTrust shed its hosting business for other ventures, the market for Web hosting and IT services in Scandinavia is widely viewed as one with a great deal of upside because of its proximity to central and eastern Europe, which are regarded as emerging IT markets, because of Scandinavia's tech-savvy population, and because the idea of hosting is still relatively new to the region. In its 2002 annual report filed in September, EuroTrust pointed out that "hosting is a practice that is still relatively new for most Scandinavian companies." And although EuroTrust has delved into many different business areas in its past, Gilson says one of the company's strengths is its vision. "They have traditionally been able to see an early trend," he says. These days, that seems like half the battle.
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