GE Lets PAA.com Expire – Domain Name in Auction (Updated)

In August of 2011, General Electric announced the acquisition of a company called PAA Laboratories. “GE Healthcare today announced it has reached an agreement to acquire PAA Laboratories, a developer and supplier of cell culture media for biomedical research and the fast-growing biopharmaceutical and vaccine manufacturing industry,” stated the news release on the GE Healthcare website. I don’t really know anything about PAA Laboratories, but the company owned the valuable PAA.com domain name.

I was looking through some of the top upcoming auctions yesterday afternoon, and I saw that PAA.com was listed in pending delete status. A Whois search showed the domain name had been registered to General Electric Company – GE. The domain name appears to have been acquired as part of the PAA Laboratories acquisition. Post-acquisition, the domain name was used as a forwarder to one of GE’s websites (GELifeSciences.com at least at one point).

It is unclear why the company let the valuable PAA.com domain name expire and delete rather than attempting to divest the asset or simply hold on to it. Prior to its deletion, the PAA.com domain name was registered at CSC, and I believe they could have assisted with the sale of the domain name had that been desired. There are also many other domain brokers who would have been happy to assist with the sale of an asset like this.

This is not the first time General Electric let valuable domain names expire. In September of this year, GE let several valuable domain names expire. After these domain names were deleted, they were caught and auctioned by NameJet and DropCatch.com. In auction, MYGE.com sold for $3,583, GECS.com sold for $1,816, and GESB.com sold for $1,050 (among quite a few other domain names).

PAA.com was caught by DropCatch.com, where it is currently in auction with a high bid of over $50,000. The auction ends in a little more than two days from now.

Update: The domain name sold for $75,050.