VeriSign, Inc.

Good day, everyone. Welcome to VeriSign's third quarter 2025 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 third quarter 2025 earnings call. Joining me are Jim Bidzos, Executive Chairman, President, and CEO, and John Callis, 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 reports on Form 10-K and 10-Q. 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. 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 John will now provide 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. VeriSign delivered both growth, and a domain name base and solid financial performance during the third quarter. We also continued our consistent return of value to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. At the end of September, the domain name base for .com and .net totaled 171.9 million domain names, up 1.4% year over year. We had strength in the quarter with 10.6 million new registrations. Revenue was up 7.3% year over year, and EPS is up 9.7% year over year. During the quarter, we returned $72 million through dividends and $215 million through share repurchases for a total return to shareholders of $287 million. The positive domain name-based trends we saw during the first half of the year continued during the third quarter. Net registrations added during the third quarter were 1.45 million names. This was made possible by the strong volume of new registrations already mentioned and improvement in the year-over-year preliminary renewal rate. The renewal rate for the third quarter of 2025 is expected to be 75.3% compared to 72.2% a year ago. The domain name base grew sequentially in our three main regions, with the U.S. and EMEA being the strongest. We're seeing solid underlying demand for our domain names and continued registrar engagement with our programs, which together have enhanced the pace of growth in new registrations. Given these continued positive domain name base trends, we now expect the growth in the domain name base to be between 2.2% and 2.5% for 2025. Our financial and liquidity position remains stable with $618 million in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities at the end of the quarter. At the end of the quarter, $1.33 billion remained available under the current share repurchase program, which has no expirations. As announced in today's earnings release, VeriSign's Board of Directors declared a cash dividend of 77 cents per share of VeriSign's outstanding common stock to stockholders of record as of the close of business on November 18, 2025, payable on November 25, 2025. VeriSign intends to continue to pay a cash dividend on a quarterly basis subject to market conditions and approval by VeriSign's Board of Directors. And now I'd like to turn the call over to John. I'll return when John has completed his financial report with some closing remarks.