A filing with the government shows that in the last week of the year, Warren Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., increased its holdings in VeriSign Inc., a business that registers domain names.
Buffett added 76,487 more shares of the company through his insurance company Geico. This brought his total number of shares in the company to 7.9 million as of Monday night. The report shows that the investor paid between $201.75 and $206.04 per share.
As of today, Berkshire BRK.B +0.62% owns 13.2 million shares of VeriSign VRSN +1.02%. This number includes the stock that its other pension plans own. FactSet says that Berkshire is the company’s biggest shareholder, followed by Vanguard. This part of the business is worth $2.7 billion right now.
MarketWatch said that Buffett’s vehicle had already bought 143,424 VeriSign shares in the three sessions that ended on December 24. Berkshire bought 377,736 VeriSign shares for a total of $73.95 million over the six sessions leading up to December 24. This means that the average price paid for the shares was $195.78.
Berkshire began buying VeriSign stock in the first quarter of 2024, as shown by its 13F filings about its stock ownership. As of March 31, it had 12,815,613 shares in total. The holding stayed the same until the latest purchases.
Phil van Doorn of MarketWatch did a study that shows VeriSign has some of the highest margins of any S&P 500 company.
Gross margin is a way to figure out how much a company can charge for its goods. It is calculated by dividing net sales by sales and subtracting the cost of goods sold. To sum up operating profit, divide earnings (before interest and taxes) by sales. Net-income margin is the difference between net income and sales.
VeriSign had a sales margin of 88.02% in the third quarter, an operation margin of 71.25%, and a net-income margin of 51.54%. These rankings put the company in eleventh place. All three of the margin measures were better than they were a year ago.
VeriSign got its name during the internet boom of the late 1990s, as it was the go-to place to register a website’s domain. Its domain names end with dot-com, dot-net, dot-cc and dot-“name.”
The stock has had a roller-coaster ride since it went public on Jan. 30, 1998. That year, it went up 131.7%, and the next year, it went up a record 1,191.8%. It reached its highest point of $253 on February 29, 2000, before the internet bubble burst.
That record was broken by the stock in 2021, when it closed at $255.93, setting a new high.
The stock was last up 0.5% at $206.19, which means it was on track to close at its highest level in about a year. In the last 10 days, it’s gone up nine times, and it’s been going up for eight days in a row, adding 7.7% to its value.
It’s up 0.1% since the beginning of the year. In 2024, the S&P 500 SPX +0.78% has gone up 24%.
