- Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has invested $74 million in infrastructure company VeriSign even as its stock has fallen 2% during a skyrocketing year for tech companies.
Warren Buffett is taking a gamble on ’90s tech company VeriSign, buying up millions of dollars’ worth of shares even as its stock price fell during an otherwise banner year for tech.
VeriSign, founded in 1995, was the go-to place to register a website’s domain name during the dotcom boom. It acts as a wholesaler of .com and .net domain names and also helps prop up the infrastructure of the internet by supporting DNS queries and maintaining two of the internet’s 13 root servers.
Despite its important infrastructure functions, the company’s stock price was down 1.38% year to date, a far cry from the 25% increase in the S&P 500 and the 30% increase in the tech-heavy Nasdaq index over the same period.
Yet, Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is doubling down on the company, which it first invested in more than a decade ago. The conglomerate bought up about 377,736 shares totaling around $74 million in trading sessions leading up to Dec. 24, MarketWatch reported.
Berkshire now owns more than 13 million shares in VeriSign worth about $2.6 billion. It is officially the company’s largest shareholder.
Part of why Berkshire may be investing in the company could be because of its high margins. VeriSign is tied with Nvidia for the fifth-best profit margin among S&P 500 companies, Markets Insider reported. And its operating margin (operating income divided by net sales) is the third highest among the biggest U.S. companies.
The company’s shares hit a peak of $253.82 in 2021 as it benefited from tech stock optimism and an uptick in year-over-year .com and .net domain name registrations. Since then, its stock price has fallen about 19%. VeriSign’s shares were trading up less than 1% at around $205 as of Monday.
Buffett’s investment in VeriSign comes as the conglomerate has been stockpiling cash and selling off stock as the overall market has skyrocketed in 2024. As of its third-quarter earnings report, Berkshire held $325 billion in cash and cash equivalents and had sold off more than half of its stake in its biggest holding, Apple.
