remained a not-for-profit membership organisation. The NCC Services Ltd management team of Managing Director Chris Pearse and directors John Morris, Peter Bird, and Chris Sadler was strengthened in March 2000 by the appointment of Rob Cotton as Finance Director and who also took over control of the Escrow division in May of that year, with Morris leaving at that time. Following a substantial fall off of revenues as Y2K came and passed, and due to the failure of the company before this date to invest in its general consultancy, security, system engineering and escrow business during the Y2K period, the group began to make monthly losses before the benefits of the changes to the escrow business instigated by Rob Cotton were felt and the company returned to profitability. Renamed NCC Group, in May 2000, and with escrow now the cornerstone of the group, Rob Cotton led a secondary management buy-out in 2003 valuing NCC Group at £30 million and supported by Barclays Private Equity. At this point, the National Computing Centre sold its shares in NCC Group as did Pearse, Bird and Sadler who left the business. The NCC Group subsequently floated on the AIM stock market in 2004 for £55 million and was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2007 with a market capitalisation of nearly £390 million as of June 2014. 21st Century NCC received substantial proceeds from the sale of NCC Group Limited (circa £11 million between 2000 and 2003 plus dividends) and from the multi-million sale of its Manchester city centre buildings (Armstrong House and Oxford House) to Bruntwood Group. Following the retirement of Perkins, Michael Gough was appointed as CEO in 2000 and NCC pursued a new strategy of rapidly developing and expanding its membership services by acquisition. After 2000, and particularly after the second sale of its shares in NCC Group in 2003, acquisitions accelerated to acquire a number of related companies, membership organisations, publications, publishing rights and to fund joint ventures. The acquisitions included: Management Consultancy News; Conspectus; CIO Connect; The Construction Industry Computing Association; Certus; The Evaluation Centre; Institute of IT Training; The Impact Programme; and PMP. Publishing rights acquired included the Naked Leader and joint ventures included: the NCC/Ashridge Business School MBA; NCC/AQA Applied ICT; and ProfIT. Funds were spent attempting to develop new products and services including web hosting which did not prove commercially successful. In 2002 NCC adopted