MW Warren Buffett is topping up his stake in this high-margin internet name

By Ciara Linnane

Regulatory filing shows Buffett has raised his stake in domain-name-registry company VeriSign

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. added to his stake in the internet domain-name-registry company VeriSign Inc. in the final week of the year, according to a regulatory filing.

Buffett used his insurance unit Geico to add 76,487 more shares of the company to his portfolio, boosting it to 7.9 million shares as of Monday's close. The investor paid between $201.75 and $206.04 per share, according to the filing.

Berkshire $(BRK.B)$ now owns 13.2 million shares of VeriSign $(VRSN)$, including the stock owned by its other pension plans, the filing shows. Berkshire is the company's majority shareholder, according to FactSet, followed by Vanguard. At current prices, that stake is worth $2.7 billion.

Buffett's vehicle already purchased 143,424 VeriSign shares in the three sessions that ended Dec. 24, as MarketWatch reported. In total, over the six sessions to Dec. 24, Berkshire bought 377,736 VeriSign shares for $73.95 million, which implies a weighted average price for the purchases of $195.78.

Berkshire's 13F disclosures of its equity holdings show that it started buying VeriSign stock in the first quarter of 2024, after which it held 12,815,613 shares as of March 31. The holding remained unchanged until the recent purchases.

An analysis by MarketWatch's Phil van Doorn shows that, among S&P 500 companies, VeriSign ranks very high on various margin measures.

Gross margin is gross profit, which is net sales minus the cost of goods sold, divided by sales, and is used to measure a company's pricing power. Operating margin can be summarized as earnings before interest and taxes, divided by sales. Net-income margin is net income divided by sales.

For VeriSign's third quarter, its gross margin of 88.02% ranked 11th, while its operation margin of 71.25% was ranked sixth, and net-income margin of 51.54% ranked seventh. And all three margin measures showed improvement from a year ago.

VeriSign made 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. It gained 131.7% that year then skyrocketed a record 1,191.8% in 1999 before peaking at a pre-internet-bubble-burst closing high of $253 on Feb. 29, 2000.

The stock surpassed that high in 2021, with a current record close of $255.93 on Dec. 29 of that year.

It was last quoted at $206.48 for a 0.3% gain on the year. The S&P 500 SPX has gained 24% in 2024.

Tomi Kilgore contributed to this article.

-Ciara Linnane

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December 31, 2024 10:40 ET (15:40 GMT)

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