Domain firm MMX notes earnings
Numbers trending up but firm has big accounting loss due to .London deal.
Top level domain name firm MMX (Minds + Machines, London AIM: MMX) noted its final results for 2018 today.
Overall, revenue was up 5% to $15.1 million following reversing nearly $0.6 million of revenue recognized in 2016. Cash collections were up 30% to $16.1 million.
Renewal revenue — a big focus for the firm — increased 97% to $9.4 million. Renewal revenue exceeded the cost of sales and fixed overhead for the first time last year.
The buyout of .XXX operator ICM Registry has helped boost the firm’s renewal revenue and reduce its exposure to China. Even without accounting for ICM, the firm reduced its revenue from China to 39% last year. With ICM, China represented 29% of revenue in 2018.
Generally speaking, domain revenue from China is seen as more fickle than from the rest of the world.
From an accounting perspective, MMX posted a loss of $12.6 million last year. Most of that was due to an atrocious legacy contract for .London. (.London is not named as the bad contract in the note but it is well known in the industry.)
In its earnings note, MMX stated that it’s working on a defensive domain registration product to launch in Q3. This will likely be modeled on Donuts’ Domains Protected Marks List.
The firm netted $480k for losing one fresh TLD auction last year, which is likely .CPA. Four groups split the proceeds of that auction. Given the withdraw costs compared to the application fee, this suggests .CPA sold for over $2 million.
