Verisign reported earnings after the market closed today.
VeriSign, Inc. reported revenue of $173 million from continuing operations for the 3rd quarter of 2010, up 2% from the prior quarter and up 10% from the same quarter in 2009.
VeriSign reported net income of $785 million or $4.48 per share for the 3rdquarter of 2010, reflecting a net gain of $737 million, net of tax of $244 million, on the sale of the Authentication Services business.
This compared to net income attributable to VeriSign, Inc. stockholders of $54 million and earnings per share attributable to VeriSign, Inc. stockholders of $0.28 on a diluted basis in the same quarter in 2009.
VeriSign reported segment revenue for Naming Services of $172 million for the third quarter of 2010, up 3% from the prior quarter and up 11% from the same quarter in 2009.
VeriSign ended the 3rd quarter with Cash, Cash Equivalents, Marketable Securities and Restricted Cash of $2.55 billion, an increase of $1.21 billion from the prior quarter and an increase of $1.12 billion from the same quarter in 2009.
VeriSign Registry Services ended the quarter with approximately 103.5 million active domain names in the adjusted zone for .com and .net, representing a 9% increase year-over-year.
In the 3rd quarter, VeriSign added 7.5 million new domain name registrations, representing a 7% increase year-over-year.
Of course what is missing from the report is that VeriSign got to also raise their prices 7% from last year, greatly contributing to their increase in operating revenue.
Shares of VeriSign are up fractionally in after market trading
what’s truly amazing, still to this day, is that the entire business is built on something that was once given away for free- a listing in the hosts file. something that in reality is not even necessary to the network (numbers, not names, are all that’s necessary), nor which has to be offered by one organisation (anyone can use their own hosts file or run their own dns – be it com/net/edu/biz/org – and they will achieve the same connectivity).
who says you can’t take something that’s previously been free to internet users and begin charging for it?
amazing.
so too is the regional registries ability to control IP allocations. these registries don’t own the network, nor control it. how can they “own” and alienate network numbers? i don’t know. it’s perplexing. but that’s what they do.
looking back to the pre-internet days, if the telephone companies didn’t own and operate all the components of their networks, could they have appointed themselves the authority to allocate phone numbers? if people knew they could connect to the phone lines and use any number not already in use, and it would work just fine, who would go to the phone company, or some other organization with no ownership rights in the network, and no legal authority to do what they do, and ask for a number?
individual companies are given 1000’s of IP’s for free and may use only a fraction, while small ISP’s are forced to rewrite packets in order to make their measlely allocations into something useful, and their users are lucky to get a single static IP, for a price. meanwhile, the public is primed with a cautionary warning: IPv4 addresses are running out. not for the large companies. lol.
it’s all quite amazing.
carry on verisign.
Verisign’s monopolistic pricing practices and ICANN’s enabling of this or looking the other way on this…and then some, must be stopped.
The past few years have been deflationary in many economies and commerce in general but Verisign has had a virtual & perpetual green light on mandating and imposing price increases on .COM and .NET domains….. Outrageous !
no other TLD can break the .com records!