VeriSign, Inc.

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

Thank you, Operator. Welcome to VeriSign's fourth quarter and full year 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 gap results and two non-gap measures used by VeriSign, adjusted EBITDA, and free cash flow. Gap to non-gap reconciliation information is appended to the 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. I'm pleased with VeriSign's success of continuing to deliver on our mission during 2024, We extended our unparalleled record of uninterrupted .com and .net resolution to more than 27 years in an increasingly evolving cyber threat environment while protecting, improving, and strengthening our network. VeriSign's network now processes, on average, more than 400 billion transactions daily. Our focus remains on providing the security, stability, and resiliency Internet users worldwide have come to depend on, not only for .com and .net, but for the DNS root zone as well. Financially, in 2024, we delivered 4.3% year-over-year revenue growth while increasing operating income by 5.7%. Shares outstanding at the end of 2024 decreased by 6.2% from the total of outstanding shares at the end of 2023. Our financial and liquidity position continues to remain stable with $600 million in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities at the end of the year. During 2024, we returned $1.2 billion of capital to shareholders through the repurchase of 6.6 million shares. At year end, $1 billion remained available and authorized under the current share repurchase program, which has no expiration. At the end of December, the domain name base in .com and .net totaled 169 million domain names, a decrease of 2.1% or 3.7 million names year over year. During the fourth quarter, the domain name base decreased by 500,000 names. From a new registration perspective, we saw improvements sequentially and year over year, with fourth quarter new registrations of 9.5 million compared with 9 million names for the same quarter last year and 9.3 million during the third quarter of 2024. The renewal rate for the fourth quarter of 2024, which is expected to be approximately 73.9%, shows improvement both sequentially and year over year. From a geographic region perspective during Q4 and the full year 2024, we saw decreases in a domain name base from both our U.S. and China-based registrars. The domain name base in EMEA was up both sequentially and for the full year 2024. In 2024, the decrease in China volumes was in line with our expectations at the start of the year. For 2025, we continue to expect our China registrar segment to decline, albeit at a slower pace. As that segment now represents only 5% of our domain name base, the decrease from China will have a smaller impact. As we have previously reported, we've seen U.S. registrars prioritize ARPU over customer acquisition through higher retail pricing levels, reduced spend on marketing to new customers compared with prior years, and an increased focus on the secondary market for domain names. These factors impacted new registrations and renewal rates in 2024 for our U.S. region. In response to these trends, we began working to re-engage registrars on new customer acquisition by launching new marketing programs for .com and .net to support our goal of returning to domain name-based growth. As we stated last quarter, we have seen positive response to our new programs, and we expect many of the registrars to engage more fully in 2025. It is early in this process, but we are optimistic that our efforts will start to improve the DNB growth trend in 2025. Given these conditions and trends, for 2025, we're expecting the year-over-year change in the base to be negative 2.3% to negative 0.3%. 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.