DLA Piper has advised XING AG on the takeover of all shares in Intelligence Competence Center (Deutschland) AG.

The deal, will see XING AG paying a purchase price of some 6.3 million euro to all shareholders for 100 per cent of the shares. Depending on whether operating targets for 2015 and 2016 are achieved, the founder of Intelligence Competence Center AG may receive further purchase price payments up to a maximum of 2.4 million euro by February 2017.

Websites operated by Intelligence Competence Center AG include www.jobbörse.com, which, with more than 2.5 million vacancies, is the largest job search engine in the German-speaking region. In addition to this, XING is securing the search technology of jobbörse.com, which currently scans some 15 million domains including more than 1.5 million company pages.

XING is a social network for professional contacts. Operating on a cross-platform basis, XING has approximately 8.3 million users in its core market of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The operator of the platform is XING AG, which was founded in 2003 in Hamburg and has been listed on the stock exchange since 2006 as well as on the TecDAX since September 2011.

The DLA Piper core team included partner Dr Matthias Lupp (Corporate, Munich), counsel Patrick Schwarzbart (Intellectual Property & Technology, Munich) and senior associates Dr Anja Köritz (Corporate, Cologne) and Sebastian Decker (Corporate, Hamburg).

In-house management of this transaction on the part of XING AG was carried out by general counsel Kai-K. Hollensteiner (lead) and principal legal counsel Felix Lasse.

The sellers were represented by Rolf C. Landgraf of the lawyers Landgraf & Schneider, Frankfurt/Main.