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If You Invested $1000 in VeriSign a Decade Ago, This is How Much It'd Be Worth Now

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For most investors, how much a stock's price changes over time is important. Not only can it impact your investment portfolio, but it can also help you compare investment results across sectors and industries.

FOMO, or the fear of missing out, also plays a role in investing, particularly with tech giants and popular consumer-facing stocks.

What if you'd invested in VeriSign (VRSN - Free Report) ten years ago? It may not have been easy to hold on to VRSN for all that time, but if you did, how much would your investment be worth today?

VeriSign's Business In-Depth

With that in mind, let's take a look at VeriSign's main business drivers.

Based in Reston, VA, VeriSign Inc. provides Internet infrastructure services that include domain name registry services and infrastructure assurance services. Its only reportable segment includes Registry Services.

VeriSign reported revenues of $1.42 billion in 2022.

Registry services operate the .com, .net, .cc, .tv, .gov, .jobs, .eduand .name domain name directories. With respect to the .com, .net and .name domains, the company has agreements with The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that makes it the exclusive registrar of these domain names. The company has an agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce with respect to the .com domain.

Other agreements make it the exclusive registry for the .tv and .cc country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) and the provider of back-end systems for all .gov, .jobs and .edu domain names. It also provides internationalized domain name (IDN) services for websites in local languages.Verisign’s gTLDs and ccTLDs can support standards-compliant registrations in more than 100 different native languages and scripts.

The company’s operations infrastructure consists of three secure data centers in Dulles, VA; New Castle, DE; and Fribourg, Switzerland as well as more than 160 resolution sites around the world.

Domain names can be registered for between one and 10 years. The .com and .net fees are charged as per agreement terms with ICANN and based on prior approval. The .name fees are charged as per terms of agreement with ICANN, while the .gov registry fees are based on the terms of agreement with the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA).

On Dec 5, 2018, Verisign completed the sale of its rights, economic benefits and obligations in all customer contracts related to the Security Services business, which primarily consisted of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Protection Services and Managed Domain Name System (DNS) Services, to NeuStar, Inc.

Bottom Line

Anyone can invest, but building a successful investment portfolio takes a combination of a few things: research, patience, and a little bit of risk. So, if you had invested in VeriSign a decade ago, you're probably feeling pretty good about your investment today.

According to our calculations, a $1000 investment made in November 2013 would be worth $3,773.54, or a gain of 277.35%, as of November 28, 2023, and this return excludes dividends but includes price increases.

In comparison, the S&P 500 gained 151.79% and the price of gold went up 55.05% over the same time frame.

Analysts are forecasting more upside for VRSN too.

VeriSign’s performance is gaining from growth in .com and .net domain name registrations. The company registered 173.9 million .com and .net domain names by third-quarter end. We expect the metric to be 174.2 million in 2023, representing a 0.2% rise year over year. It continues to expand its critical infrastructure to tap the rising demand for DNS navigation services in industries like commerce, education and healthcare. Also, its share repurchase program is noteworthy. However, it lowered its domain name base growth guidance due to continued uncertainty and weakness related to China.Management now expects domain name base growth to fall 0.4% to rise 0.4% compared with earlier projection of flat to growth of 1%. Stiff competition from Google’s free public domain name service, high-debt burden and rising expenses are concerns.

The stock has jumped 7.99% over the past four weeks. Additionally, no earnings estimate has gone lower in the past two months, compared to 1 higher, for fiscal 2023; the consensus estimate has moved up as well.

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