Sentiment Analysis of the earnings transcript to help figure out if there are any bullish or bearish sentiments that could be gathered from it. We're doing ML and AI based analysis on the earnings call to get some more insights.
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| Statement |
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| Overall, Verisign has continued to demonstrate sound financial performance during the last quarter and throughout 2023 and we look forward to building on our strengths in our mission in the coming year |
| 2023 marked another solid year of execution delivering consistent financial results while enhancing our critical internet infrastructure and extending our record of .com and .net DNS availability beyond 26 years |
| These goals remain unchanged and support our commitment to deliver strong financial results including steady growth in revenue, operating income and EPS |
| So, having basically a unique strong global identifier that you can use for all of the coming serves as an applications as we get more connected, more active is a tremendous benefit |
| I’ll just reiterate our confidence in what the outcome will be and reiterate our strong desire and exciting anticipation of bringing .web to market to our extended channel and to their millions of customers |
| So it’s a very positive development for the DNS and it reinforces the utility of a domain name and the already strong value proposition of a domain name |
| So, basically, being able to link your domain name to it is basically using this domain name and capping the DNS base with its global unique and stable identifier, all the benefits in the security that’s associated with it linking the block chain spaces, I think is a smart move and really good |
| So we think this is really good news |
| We firmly believe our responsible and disciplined management of our business and capital continue to service well allowing us to report another solid year, which in our view is one in which we fulfill our stewardship mission of providing secure and reliable infrastructure services, manage our business responsibly and efficiently and returning capital to our shareholders |
| Yeah, well this is really a positive development for the DNS |
| And the linkage itself benefits from the cryptographic strength of the DNS like DNSSEC, the domain name system security extensions |
| While demand from our registrars in China is expected to continue to remain soft in 2024, the fundamentals of our business remains strong |
| During 2023, revenue grew 4.8% year-over-year while operating income increased by 6.1% |
| So the ownership that – the resolution of a domain name, all benefit from the underlying DNS that cryptographic protection to the strong public key infrastructure base things |
| For the quarter ended December 31, 2023, the company generated revenue of $380 million, up 3% from the same quarter of 2022, and delivered operating income of $256 million, an increase of 4.4% from the same quarter a year ago |
| For the year ended December 31, 2023, the company generated revenue of $1.493 billion, up 4.8% and delivered operating income of $1 billion, up 6.1% from 2022 |
| It adds more utility and I think significantly more value to domain names |
| And so, we will continue to focus on that framework that has served us well over the past several years |
| But very interesting in the future of all that |
| Cumulatively, these income tax benefits increased net income by $69.3 million, and increased diluted earnings per share by $0.68 |
| So on a normalized basis if you would adjust for that, we would have been closer to a 3.3% expense growth rate here in 2023, which is still I think a good job by the teams in managing the expense that they are responsible for |
| Excluding registrars based in China, our domain name base grew by 1.2 million names or 0.8% during 2023 |
| But I will point out that that was favorably impacted by a $5 million reduction in fees paid to the government of Tuvalu |
| And we are confident that that’s going to come to an end that those will run out eventually |
| So, I jumped on your question, because it’s a great opportunity to point to something we’ve been quietly working on for a while that’s I think now adding real value |
| And so, this is actually a new web three type of application realizing that there is a stable and secure base out there that you can link to and to get all the advantages out it and let people use those identifiers they already have |
| And so, this underlying secure, reliable infrastructure, along with the well governed space is why people are navigating with the DNS, it’s reliable |
| And the ability to get a domain name registrant and have it activated and have it resolved and also well regulated |
| Our financial and liquidity positions remains stable with $926 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities at the end of the year |
| Jim Bidzos Well, Ygal, just to add, I mean, the reason for that is that we don’t publicize a lot of the things that we do but for years, we’ve been working on what we call responsible integration of alternative name spaces with the DNS for the very reason that we believe that at some point the secure, well regulated underlying DNS is going to be a better basis for a global identifier for folks |
| Statement |
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| China-based registrar demand has been weak as a result of several factors including challenging economic conditions, a more stringent regulatory environment and the impact of a weaker local currency combined with retail pricing adjustments |
| While there are many factors that drive demand for domain names, declining demand from China remains the primary source of drag on the overall domain name base growth |
| So just curious how we can ballpark that? George Kilguss Yeah, Rob, as Jim mentioned, in 2023, China clearly was a drag down about 2.2 million units and from a revenue perspective, which you will see in our when we file our Q, our revenue from China was down about $14.4 million |
| It was down by about 500,000 units in the domain names base year-over-year |
| Therefore we believe it’s prudent to expect China to continue to negatively impact revenue and domain base growth during 2024 |
| However, with the China base portion of our base now at about 5% of our overall domain name base, we see the negative trend in China having a less pronounced effect on our overall business after 2024 |
| For the full year, new registrations were 39.4 million names, down 490,000 names from the 39.9 million names we saw during 2022 |
| Our domains under management from China-based registrars declined by 2.2 million names in 2023 |
| The regulatory environment is one in which the process of obtaining domain names is a little bit more challenging, a lot more process, a lot more identification, confirmation authentication of the person registering, et cetera, process basically that makes it a little bit more difficult |
| And so, what we’ve seen so far is basically process and procedure delays |
| Both first time and previously renewed names were lower year-over-year |
| Those are hard to predict that the challenging economic climate there, very difficult to predict what impact it’s having, how long that will last |
| During the fourth quarter, the domain name base decreased by 1.2 million domain names |
| So, those are certainly the influence we are guiding to a flattish DNB, domain name base as a result and it’s just really difficult to predict |
| I mentioned in my remarks that we saw a 2.2 million unit decline from China registrars and that we had 1.2 million growth from registrars outside of China |
| Less margin expansion at least to start here on the expectation for next year than what we saw this year |
| At the end of December, the domain base in .com and .net totaled 172.9 million domain names, down 0.6% from 173.8 million names at the end of 2022 |
| But we didn’t see good growth in EMEA as well as in our other all other segments |
| And as we’ve mentioned for a couple of quarters now, foreign exchange is an issue as well, that increases cost of goods obviously for registrars selling domain names |
| Some of the things that are going on, migration and other stuff are things or shifts are making it difficult to really assess the impact, is it at the bottom? Is it bouncing along the bottom? When will it change? Those are really hard to see inside of a very opaque market |
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