Earnings, nearly 70% operating margin — Verisign posts

Results continue to tick upward as firm pushes for price increases.

Chart of Verisign's revenue and profit - VRSN

.Com registry Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) noted first quarter earnings yesterday afternoon.

It generated $306 million revenue for the quarter and a 69.4% non-GAAP operating margin. The business created $187 million in operating cash flow.

People registered 9.8 million .com and .net domain names in the first quarter of the year, resulting in net growth of 1.82 million in the domain base for these two top level domain names.

The firm narrowed its guidance for the year by removing the lower end. It now expects $1.220 billion to $1.235 billion in revenue. It expects the .com/.net domain base to increase by 2.5% to 4.25% by the end of the year.

On the conference call, most analysts wanted to understand the status of .Web (it’s in arbitration between Afilias and ICANN but Verisign wants to join the arbitration) and .com price increases (Verisign is working through a process with ICANN to get the price increases that the NTIA approved.)

Also on the wire