Pacnet Looking To Acquire Public CDNs In Asia: CDNetworks or ChinaCache In Play?

In a story on Bloomberg this morning focusing on Pacnet delaying their public offering, CEO Bill Barney is also quoted talking about acquisitions in the content delivery market. He's quoted as saying, “We’ve been looking at acquisitions not only in Australia, but also in Japan, China and India. We call them players in the content delivery space and we’ve been quite active in the last few weeks.” The article also goes on to say that Pacnet’s acquisition targets include two listed companies, the names of which Pacnet would not identify.

While there are a bunch of companies offering content delivery services in Asia including Broadmedia, CDNetworks, ChinaCache, J-Stream, NTT Communications and PCCW amongst others, CDNetworks and ChinaCache are clearly the leaders in the APAC market when it comes to CDN related revenue and number of customers. In addition, the two are pureplay CDNs who's focus is primarily on delivering content, as opposed to some of the other companies who have many services outside of CDN. Although ChinaCahe is not listed on any exchange, I don't think that rules them out.

I expect we will start to see even more carriers start to make some moves before long to enter the CDN market, especially in Asia and India.