VeriSign, Inc.

Good day, everyone. Welcome to VeriSign's second quarter 2024 earnings call. Today's conference is being recorded. Recording of this call is not permitted unless pre-authorized. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. David Atchley, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Treasurer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Welcome to VeriSign's second quarter 2024 earnings call. Joining me are Jim Bidzos, Executive Chairman, President, and CEO, and George Kilgus, Executive Vice President and CFO. This call and presentation are being webcast from the Investor Relations website, which is available under about VeriSign on VeriSign.com. There you will also find our earnings release. At the end of this call, the presentation will be available on that site, and within a few hours, the replay of the call will be posted. Financial results in our earnings release are unaudited, and our remarks include forward-looking statements that are subject to the risks and uncertainties that we discuss in detail in our documents filed with the SEC, specifically the most recent report on Form 10-K. VeriSign does not update financial performance or guidance during the quarter unless it is done through a public disclosure. The financial results in today's call and the matters we will be discussing today include GAAP results and two non-GAAP measures used by VeriSign, adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow. GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation information is appended to this slide presentation, which can be found on the investor relations section of our website, available after this call. Jim and George will provide some prepared remarks, and afterward we will open the call for your questions. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Jim. Thank you, David.

Good afternoon to everyone, and thank you for joining us. Before we cover results, I'd like to note that last week we marked 27 years of 100% uninterrupted availability for the .com.net domain name resolution system. This milestone represents an unparalleled achievement in our industry for operating secure, stable, and resilient DNS infrastructure. For well over a quarter of a century, amidst some of the most technologically significant changes the world has ever experienced, Our teams have successfully built, maintained, operated, and evolved the infrastructure that enables hundreds of billions of queries a day and supports trillions of dollars in global commerce. In fact, we answer, on average, 328 billion queries per day, billion with a B, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and that's over 3.7 million per second. We do this amidst ever-increasing Internet demand and resilience, evolving technology, and a challenging global cyber threat environment. Turning now to our results, we delivered another quarter of operational and financial stability by focusing on our mission as a critical internet infrastructure provider. For the second quarter, revenues grew 4.1% year over year, operating income grew 7.1% year over year, and earnings per share grew 12.3% year over year. At the end of June, the domain name base in .com and .net totaled 170.6 million domain names, During the second quarter, the domain name base decreased by 1.8 million names. From a new registration perspective, the second quarter ended with 9.2 million new registrations compared with 10.2 million names for the same quarter last year. The renewal rate for the second quarter of 2024 is expected to be approximately 72.6% compared to 73.4% a year ago. As we have previously reported, we continue to see U.S. registrars prioritize ARPU over customer acquisition through higher retail pricing levels and reduced spend on marketing to new customers compared with prior years. These factors are impacting new registrations and renewal rates and are leading to weaker trends in 2024 that are below our original expectations. During the second quarter, the U.S. region was lowered by about 800,000 names. In addition, and as expected, China-related weakness continues and contributed to most of the remaining sequential decline in the second quarter. The domain name base from our EMEA region was up slightly during the second quarter. We have rolled out new registrar marketing programs over the past several weeks to support our registrars and our goal of returning to domain name base growth in the second half of 2025. However, given the ongoing impact of the factors we've mentioned, we now expect the change in the domain name base to be between negative 3% to a negative 2% for full year 2024. Our financial and liquidity position continues to remain stable with $690 million in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities at the end of the quarter. During the second quarter, we repurchased 2.2 million shares for $388 million. Effective today, the Board of Directors has increased the amount authorized for share repurchase of VeriSign common stock by $1.11 billion, to a total of $1.5 billion authorized and available under the share repurchase program, which has no expiration. And now I'd like to turn the call over to George. I'll return when George has completed his financial report with closing remarks.