CentralNic Group Plc (LON:CNIC), today announced its half year results for the six months ended June 30th 2016.

For the six months to June 30, the company reported £45.08mln of billings – the gross amount charged for domains before revenue sharing – which represents an 468% increase compared to the same period of 2015.

CentralNic’s revenue amounted to £8.9mln, double the £4.44mln in the first half of last year.

Gross profit was up 19% to £2.28mln, while it reported earnings (adjusted EBITDA) of £1.3mln.

The apparent step change in the business was in-part due to the acquisition of Instra Group in January.

Premium domain sales in 2015 did not re-occur in the first half of 2016 causing margins reduced to 26% from 43% last year.

It reported adjusted pre-tax profits of £948,000, though after tax the group made a £1.3mln loss.

CentralNic ended the first half with £9.25mln of cash and equivalents, and £6.04mln of net cash after borrowings.

CentralNic is the number one backend provider of new gTLDs globally with 34% market share or 8.2 m domain names but which seems to have generated revenue of just £1.6m which would be only £.20 per domain this added EBITDA contribution of £0.7m (£0.6m).

“.xyz continues to rank in the number one spot of all new gTLD’s with 6.5 million …Whilst the benefit has not translated into material earnings yet, due to heavy discounts, there are now significant volumes of domain names that will be up for renewal within the next 12 months. Although the scale of renewals is unknown (we conservatively assume 10% renewal rate), of the 6.5m .xyz domains, for every 1% that renew, CentralNic receives over £0.1m in EBITDA based on current renewal prices.

Additional domain extensions won in the period include .store, .fm, .am and .art.