The old Melbourne IT survived the dotcom bubble’s bursting but could not handle COVID-19 without being gobbled up.

A year ago, when Webcentral was still called Arq Group, we remarked that any selling by its directors was probably as good a signal as any to follow suit, given the company’s steadily declining fortunes.
Who knew they could decline quite so far? On Monday, chairman Andrew Reitzer recommended to shareholders the scheme of arrangement proposed by private equity-owned, Florida-based digital titan Web.com.
Martin Mercer sold more than a third of his stake for $1.73 a share.  
At 10¢ cash a share, the offer represented, Reitzer said, “an attractive premium” to the company’s recent trading. Which it most certainly does, given its shares closed at 6.5¢ on Friday.
Still, it’s a rather sad end to a company that (when it was called Melbourne IT) survived the dot-com bubble’s bursting but couldn’t withstand COVID-19 without being gobbled up.
Just more than a year ago on May 27, its then-CEO Martin Mercer sold more than a third of his stake for $1.73 a pop (reluctantly, he said, to fund tax obligations). And only in February, Webcentral booked $35 million ($29 million in cash) from selling its enterprise division to some of its executives (including interim CEO Tristan Sternson), the said executives having sold their business to Arq for $34 million only four years earlier.