Melbourne IT's share price jumped 45 cents by mid afternoon yesterday, following news of the announcement that its domain name registration business, Internet Names WorldWide, has licensed the rights to provide Chinese character-based domain names.
It is the first domain name registry in the world which has been accredited to do so.
The move will allow Melbourne IT to expand further into the non-English speaking world, and it is expected the agreement will be extended in the future to other character-based languages such as Japanese, Arabic, Thai and Tamil.
The present domain name system operates only in Roman characters.