Slovakia tops 40 thousand .eu registrations
Brussels, 29 May 2013 - Slovak companies and residents have to date registered more than forty thousand .eu domain names, according to EURid, the registry for the .eu top-level domain (TLD). In terms of registrations, Slovakia is the fourteenth largest market in the European Union, behind Hungary and Greece, ahead of Denmark and Ireland.
In Slovakia, .eu has shown stable growth over the past few years, with a registration growth rate steadily above the EU average of 5.4 %. Many .eu domain name holders believe that .eu is a natural alternative to their national TLD and often prefer it to other – mainly generic – TLDs, such as .com. In 2012, .eu grew by 23.2% in Slovakia, with only Malta and Slovenia having slightly higher growth rates.
Why choose .eu?
.eu is becoming increasingly popular amongst small-to-medium-sized entrepreneurs and cross-border companies, as it unifies individual countries under one European identity. More than 31 % of .eu domain names are used for business purposes, according to .eu’s 2012 annual report, giving .eu a higher percentage of business websites than generic TLDs like .com, .net or .info.
Among the Slovak companies that have chosen .eu as their online home are chocolate maker Deva and mineral water supplier Mitická, as well as Whirlpool – a company that, although not Slovak, has a large plant near Poprad. Of the multinational companies known to Slovak customers, Hyundai, Bridgestone and UniCredit have also opted for .eu.
Aside from its cross-border appeal, .eu domain names can also contain diacritics, which are typical in the Slovak language. This advantage is especially significant to the local market, since neither .sk nor .cz offer domain names with special characters, also known as Internationalised Domain Names. .eu allows the registration of domain names in all official European scripts, including Cyrillic and Greek.
There are approximately 7.3 .eu domain names per 1 000 inhabitants in Slovakia. This figure is lower than in Austria and the Czech Republic (15.7 and 15, respectively) but higher than in Poland (6.2) or Hungary (4.5).