[NA-Discuss] Is Verisign for sale ?

[John R. Levine]

> Publicly available financial filings show that VeriSign is strongly profitable.

In the December quarter, VRSN lost $40M on sales of $176M.  In the March 
quarter, they made $40M on sales of $181M.  In the June quarter they lost 
$10.6M on sales of $189M, so, no, they're not.  It really is not helpful 
to make false assertions when you can look up the facts in 30 seconds.

It's hard to figure out VRSN's long term financial picture because they've 
been shedding units like crazy, most notably the SSL cert business.  In 
the September 2010 quarter they had a $741M adjustment for discontinued 
operations which I presume is the SSL business.  In the three quarters 
since then, they've lost money, but they have huge interest expenses, 
$112M this quarter and they're in the process of buying a headquarters 
building for $118M.  They have a billion dollars in cash and $584M in long 
term debt which doesn't strike me as good planning in this economy.

So they're not profitable, but I think that is more likely due to all of 
the other stuff they're doing than to lack of cash flow from all those 
registrations.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly