Tucows reveals portfolio sale price and data center plans.
Domain name, mobile and internet services company Tucows (NASDAQ: TCX) released earnings for Q4 and full-year 2018 yesterday.
In its pre-recorded commentary about the earnings, the company disclosed that it generated about $3.2 million from a bulk sale of domains from its portfolio in Q4. Elliot Silver reported on this transaction with GoDaddy in December. The two companies completed a similar transaction in Q4 2017 but for only $2 million. The 2017 transaction was for approximately 10% of Tucows’ domain portfolio excluding surname domain names.
It will be interesting to see if Tucows does another Q4 transaction this year.
Tucows CEO Elliot Noss made a couple of other interesting comments during the call.
First, the company bought land in Centennial, Colorado to build a data center.
Second, Noss said he’s more concerned about a recession in 2019 than in over a decade. He made the comment in relation to how the company handles share buybacks:
Today, we again announced an open market buyback program that will commence immediately. The program will allow us to repurchase up to $40 million worth of our shares over the course of the next 12 months. This year, more than any year since 2007, I find myself concerned about a possible recession. That potential will inform our thinking in terms of the program.
The earnings release is here.
JTW says
Hi Andrew,
$3.2m is interesting, does it say how many actual domains that figure translates into?
Regards,
JTW.
Andrew Allemann says
No, it doesn’t disclose that.
Rick Vidallon says
About 10 years ago if you were a registrar the cost of securing domain names from icann was about $0.25. Not sure what it is today, but the ROI for resale on the open market as a domain registrar is probably still somewhere between 200 to 500 percent. And since most people register there domains for more than one year I’d say that’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Andrew Allemann says
The ICANN fee is $.18 and the Verisign fee for a .com is $7.85. Most registrars have relatively low markups.