Quite big news from Asia’s web world today: Japanese telecommunications giant KDDI (US$40 billion revenue) announced [JP] it will buy an 85.5% stake in CDNetworks, the Korea-based content delivery network, for US$167 million.
KDDI says the plan is to turn the CDNetworks HQ in Seoul into a subsidiary and to expand its global business (CDNetworks also has offices in the US, China, Europe, and KDDI’s home market of Japan).
CDNetworks’ core product offering is a Web Performance Suite that accelerates web content delivery and application performance for customers. The company currently offers over 130 content storage points at servers located in a total of 70 cities in 31 countries. With the acquisition, KDDI wants to be ready for the projected mobile data traffic explosion over the next years (KDDI itself has over 30 million mobile subscribers in Japan).
CDNetworks was founded in Seoul in 2000, is listed at the Korean Stock Exchange and currently boasts over 1,200 customers worldwide (including LinkedIn, Yelp, or German social network StudiVZ). The company hit US$99 million in revenue last fiscal and claims sales have been growing 20% a year on average since 2007.