Recent Posts
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Post-lockdown blues hit Tucows’ growth
Tucows’ domain business was pretty much flat in the fourth quarter and full-year 2021, as the company hit the trough following the spike of the pandemic lockdown bump.
The registrar said last night that its Domain Services business saw new registrations down or flat in both wholesale and retail channels, even when compared to pre-pandemic levels.
The company said (pdf) it ended the year with 25.2 million domains under management, down from 25.4 million a year earlier. The total number of new, renewed or transferred-in domains was 17.4 million, down from 18.2 million.
For the fourth quarter, the total new, renewed or transferred-in domains was 4 million, compared to 4.3 million a year earlier.
In prepared remarks (pdf), CEO Elliot Noss said that wholesale-segment registrations were down 6% to 3.7 million in Q4 and new registrations were down 27% from 2020’s pandemic-related “outsized volumes”.
In retail, total new, renewed and transferred registrations for the quarter were just over 310,000, down 16%, he said. New registrations were down 21% year over year.
The domains business reported revenue of $61.4 million in the fourth quarter, down from $61.8 million in the year-earlier period.
Domain revenue from wholesale was down to $47.1 million from $47.5 million. Retail was down to $8.7 million from $9.2 million. EBITDA across both channels was $11.6 million, down from $12.1 million.
The renewal rates for wholesale and retail were a more-than-respectable 80% and 85% respectively.
Some of the declines can be attributed to the pandemic-related bump Tucows and other registrars experienced in 2020.
Margins had been impacted a bit by the acquisition of UNR’s back-end registry business, the integration of which Noss said has now been fully completed.
For the full company, including non-domain businesses such as mobile and fiber, revenue for the year was down 2.2% at $304.3 million and net income was down 41.7% at $3.4 million.
The company also announced it has renewed its $40 million share buyback program.
I’ve let ~40 domains expire across Hover, Gandi, and iwantmyname. All of these were purchased with the intent to build atop them but now that I have the SLD as a TLD on Handshake, they lost their value to me.