Instra snapped up for $35m

Instra Corp CEO Desleigh Jameson, pictured with CentralNic CEO Ben Crawford, will soon be hiring more staff thanks to new owner CentralNic's focus on growth. Photo / Paul Taylor

A Napier company has sold for $35 million to London Stock Exchange-listed CentralNic.

Instra Corp employs 32 people in the Public Trust building in Napier's Tennyson St and is expected to hire more staff.

Last week, CentralNic's chief executive Ben Crawford visited the Napier office. Instra was one of a handful of companies with a presence in 150 countries thanks to its 18 years in the internet domain-name industry, he said.

Instra and related company OnlyDomains had a strong presence in emerging markets, on which CentralNic was focusing for growth.

"I have travelled the world looking for businesses to acquire, and OnlyDomains and its related companies were the best I found anywhere," he said.

"It has already helped almost 100,000 businesses get online in New Zealand, Australia and many other countries. Their customer service team in Napier is so good we are going to give them responsibility for all our existing clients globally."

Instra's chief executive Desleigh Jameson will head all of CentralNic's worldwide retail operations and join its board.

She said Instra would soon be hiring more staff but shiftwork was an important part of the business. "Most of our work is global so we speak 10 different languages and we work 24/7 from the building," she said.

Instra appeared on the radar in February 2013 when cloud-storage tycoon Kim Dotcom chose it to service his encrypted file-sharing service Mega.

Instra was owned by Tony Lentino who lives in Wellsford but was in Hawke's Bay as a schoolboy, where family remain.

After Mr Dotcom's arrest for alleged copyright infringements in 2012, Mr Lentino and his wife assisted Mr Dotcom's family and Mr Lentino later became a major investor and chief executive of Mega.

Ms Jameson said Instra's sponsorship of Super Black Racing, the sole New Zealand entry in the Australian V8 Supercars Championship, would continue.