10 Interesting Facts From The Tucows Q4 Earnings

A few snippets of interest came out of the 2009 earnings call for TCX. For the record, neither I, nor any company I’m associated with own any shares in TCX.

1. Revenue for the fourth quarter increased 6.1%

2. New registrations up more than 10%

3. For 2009 as a whole, domain service revenue grew almost 10% compared to 2008.

4. YummyNames, (their domain portfolio group) also had another strong quarter with revenue up 78% year-over-year.

5. In 2009 YummyNames revenue grew by 35% compared to 2008 with $250,000 of sales in the last quarter.

6. “the number of individual name transactions which has grown more than tenfold to over 150 in the fourth quarter of 2009 from just 14 in the fourth quarter of 2008 with the average price remaining relatively constant.”

7. “Gross margin for the YummyNames, our domain portfolio services category, increased by $649,000 to $1.3 million from $680,000 for the same quarter of fiscal 2008. This increase was due to the strong domain name sales that Elliott described earlier which grew by 945,000 compared to the fourth quarter of 2008.

8. (Following on from point 7) “These increases were partially offset by a decrease of 296,000 in the delivery of third-party advertisements on parked pages.”

9. “Gross margin from our OpenSRS service which includes domain services, email services and other wholesale services was $4 million or 24% of net sales compared to $4.5 million or 27% of net sales for the fourth quarter of 2008. This decrease primarily resulted from the declining email revenue as well as the impact of the registry price increases and the success we have been seeing from our strategy to grow revenue from higher volume, lower priced customers.”

10. “There is a much greater willingness or a much greater recognition that the right thing to do when you are starting a business on the internet is often to spend $500-5,000 and get an excellent name instead of trying to drop a vowel or be cute with some exotic CCTLD when naming a business. That is happening on the demand side. It is tough to say how that will ramp up. I think that I am hoping for growth and would be just fine if that business was roughly flattish.”

Here are the numbers for the bean counters (don’t get too excited). Feel free to post a comment and tell us what you think.

Tucows To Buy Back Shares

Tucows, Inc. (TCX) is commencing a ‘Dutch auction’ tender offer to repurchase up to 5 million shares of its common stock. This represents approximately 7.4 percent of Tucows’ outstanding shares.

Kikabink News has covered the story, providing some interesting commentary: “Companies vary in their motivations for doing share buy-backs. It can be a sign of huge faith in the company or it can be for other reasons. I won’t speculate here, but if I was an investor in Tucows I sure would want to know…”

You can view the latest Tucows share price on the right hand side of the page.  This year its gone from 0.31 to 0.56. What are your thoughts on this?

Tucows and Afternic Auction Expired Names

Tucows Inc., (AMEX:TCX, TSX:TC) has announced an exclusive agreement with Afternic to auction Tucows’ daily inventory of expired domain names.

The guys at Tucows have prepared a little video with Bill Sweetman, General Manager, Domain Portfolio to explain it:

You could watch the video…. but this sums it up – “Instead of having to search Tucows, you can just use Afternic to find expired names”. Easy.