Team Internet‘s CEO has a one-line answer for why the sale of its domain division keeps slipping past every deadline the company has set for it. “We can sell DIS only once,” Michael Riedl told analysts on September 7, explaining why a deal he’d guided toward the first half of the third quarter still hasn’t materialized. The valuation target hasn’t moved an inch, though. It’s still “materially exceeding” $160 million, the same figure the board has repeated since November.
The asset in question is Domains, Identity and Software, the division running registry platforms behind more than half of the top twenty new top-level domains and reaching customers through roughly 17,000 channel partners. Team Internet launched a strategic review back in November 2025, arguing the group’s share price didn’t reflect what its individual businesses were actually worth, and DIS was always the piece attracting the most serious interest.
The timeline has shifted repeatedly since then. April brought talk of “highly engaged parties.” June set a specific target, an outcome in the first half of Q3, with completion expected sometime in 2026. That window has now closed without an announcement, and September’s update dropped the calendar reference entirely in favor of “near term” and “around the year end.”
Riedl was blunt about the slip. “It has not happened that way,” he said of the June guidance, adding that the board isn’t managing toward a specific date and is willing to give buyers “a few more weeks” if that’s what it takes to land the right price. He also hinted the division could sell whole or in pieces, noting some parties want only certain parts of DIS, and at high valuations.
The numbers behind the patience make sense on paper. DIS net revenue rose 7.7% to $40.8 million in the first half, with adjusted EBITDA up 28% to $13.7 million. Group net debt, meanwhile, climbed to $117.6 million from $87.6 million six months earlier, pushing leverage to 3.9 times. CFO William Green insisted the balance sheet doesn’t depend on this deal closing, pointing to $78.2 million in available liquidity and refinancing options well ahead of an October 2027 maturity.
Riedl laid out what a sale would fund, in order: debt first, then a capital return through buyback or special dividend, then reinstating the dividend suspended in 2025. Whether that sequence starts this year or next comes down to one thing, in Riedl’s own words: “We are optimizing for price and not for timeline.”
