Berkshire Hathaway has purchased more shares of VeriSign Inc.(VRSN) and has become the company’s largest shareholder. This was disclosed in an SEC Form 4 filing made on December 24. It shows that Warren Buffet has a lot of confidence in VeriSign.
Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is an American multinational conglomerate holding company led by CEO Warren Buffet. It is headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska. Berkshire Hathaway focuses on insurance and reinsurance, energy generation, and many others. It is one of the largest companies in the whole world by market capitalization.
VeriSign Inc(VRSN) is a reputed company that established itself as a market leader in domain registration services and internet infrastructure, manages top-level domains like .com, .net, and others. VeriSign was founded in 1995, and since then it has been profitable because of its strong business model, whose revenue comes mainly from domain renewals. VeriSign is among the top companies in the S&P 500 for profitability.
VeriSign’s gross margin is 88.02%, which ranks 11th among all S&P 500 companies. Its operating margin which means profit before taxes and interest was 71.25%, ranking 6th and its net income margin was 51.54% ranking 7th among all S&P 500 companies. Still, the profit margins are improving than the last year, which shows that VeriSign is running its business very efficiently.
Berkshire purchased 377,736 shares of VeriSign, which cost around $73.95 million and it comes to an average price of $195.78 per share. Now Berkshire Hathaway holds in total 13,193,349 shares which represents 13.7% of VeriSign shares.The total valuation of Berkshire Hathaway’s stake is valued at around $2.67 Billion, thus it became the largest shareholder of VeriSign.
This investment shows Berkshire Hathaway has a lot of confidence in VeriSign, which indicates a positive signal for long-term investors.
