OREANDA-NEWS. November 9, 2012. RBC OJSC (MICEX-RTS: RBCM) closed a deal to acquire Russia's biggest domain name registrar RU-CENTER in June 2012. The integration of the asset into Hosting Community, which is a part of RBC, is scheduled to be completed by mid-2013. Alongside this, the merged group is working on expanding its range of services. Hosting Community's short-term goal is to secure above-market revenue growth and raise business efficiency.

The group's structure has been optimized since the start of the integration process by eliminating overlapping functions (back office, client support, project development). As a result, the total headcount has been cut by about 5%. Business processes are being streamlined. For example, the number of billing systems used by the group companies is being reduced. Hosting Community's management has been set the goal of reaching at least 15% EBITDA margin in 2013 by way of cost-cutting synergies, in particular cost of goods sold decrease, and intensive development of the unified business.

The merged group holds leadership on the Russian domain registration market with about a 51% share of all domain names with .ru, .su and .pф extensions, or about 74% of all domain owners. The companies of the group service over 4m domain names in various geographical areas and are the biggest registration group in Eastern Europe. The group's share of the hosting market stands at about 30%, which is nearly three times more than that of its closest rival. The group's revenue is reflective of its top positions in both segments: hosting and domain name registration account for approximately 85% of the total revenue.

The strategic goal of the merged Hosting Community Group is to establish a universal provider for IT departments of small and medium-sized companies and offer them a full range of required solutions. To accomplish this goal, Hosting Community has been active in rolling out value-added services and plans to raise their share in consolidated revenue. New projects include Website constructor, which makes it possible for customers to design without special training their own sites tailored to promotion in search engines, and a goMobi™ constructor service, enabling users to deploy a site that can be accessed by any mobile devices.

In addition to the above-mentioned services, the merged group intends in 2013 to actively develop its own and partner cloud solutions such as VPS (virtual private service) and VPC (virtual private cloud), so that the customers will no longer have to use server hardware, and continue expanding services related to the provision of its own and partner SSL certificates.