United Internet AG is a global Internet services company headquartered in Montabaur, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. The company is structured in two business areas, Access and Applications, and has a total of 16 brands and numerous subsidiaries. The well-known brands under the umbrella of United Internet AG include 1&1, IONOS, GMX, WEB.DE and 1&1 Versatel. United Internet AG is listed in MDAX, TecDAX - going public in 1998 (under the name 1&1 Internet AG &Co. KGaA). United Internet comprises over 27 million customer accounts and runs business in over 30 locations across the world. History The history of the Group goes back to 1&1 EDV-Marketing GmbH, which was founded in 1988 by Ralph Dommermuth and Wendelin Abresch as a service provider for marketing and advertising. In the 1990s, the company grew into a large corporation that offered web hosting packages as well as its own online service that allowed users to dial up to the Internet. In March 1998, the company went public under the name 1&1 Internet AG &Co. KGaA. It later becomes United Internet AG, under whose umbrella the 1&1 brand stands for Internet access products. Ordinary shares with a notional share of capital stock of one euro each were used. United Internet's IPO took place before the peak of the New Economy, but the share reached a closing price of over 200 percent of the issue price on the first day of trading. Between 2000 and 2003, the subsidiary 1&1 entered various foreign markets, including the UK, France and the USA. In May 2005, United Internet acquired the portal and e-mail business of Web.de, which was merged with its in-house offering GMX to form 1&1 Mail & Media GmbH. In December 2008, it was announced that the company would take over united-domains AG, based in Starnberg, Germany, for around € 34 million. In May 2009, United Internet announced the acquisition of the DSL business of Freenet AG. As a result, the company's DSL customers - most recently around 700,000 - were transferred to United Internet for a total of 123 million euros. As a result of the takeover, the connections of former Freenet customers temporarily failed to work, while former Tiscali customers had their connections switched off in this context. The AdLink Group has no longer belonged to United Internet since July 2009; it was sold to the French group Hi-Media. On September 3, 2014, United Internet announced that