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Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
VeriSign, Inc. (VRSN) Reports Results for Q2 2025; Baird Raises PT to $340
VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRSN) is included in our list of the 11 Hot Software Stocks to Buy Now. A medical professional demonstrating the use of a Software-Based Prescription Digital Therapeutics Platform for treating Type 2 Diabetes. A day after its earnings release, on July 25, 2025, Baird raised its price target on VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRSN) from $305 to $340, maintaining an 'Outperform' rating. VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRSN)'s EPS, which stood at $2.21 during the quarter, slightly missed the $2.24 consensus. Improving domain registration trends and stronger renewal rates, particularly in Asia-Pacific, resulted in a 5.9% revenue growth, bringing it to $410 million. The company ended the quarter with 170.5 million .com and .net domain names, which is an increase of 660,000 compared to last quarter. Looking ahead, VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRSN) raised its full-year domain base growth outlook to 1.2%-2.0%. Furthermore, during the quarter, the company returned $235 million to shareholders through dividends and buybacks, expanding its repurchase authorization to $1.5 billion. VeriSign maintains its focus on stability and security, as evident from the fact that this year marks 28 consecutive years of 100% DNS availability. For the full year, it expects $1.645-$1.655 billion in revenue and $1.117-$1.127 billion in operating income. VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRSN) delivers critical internet infrastructure, including the .com and .net domain registries. It is included in our list of the hot stocks to buy. While we acknowledge the potential of VRSN as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock. READ NEXT: 13 Best Oil Refinery Stocks to Buy Right Now and 7 Best Potash Stocks to Buy According to Analysts. Disclosure: None.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
VeriSign, Inc. (VRSN) Reports Results for Q2 2025; Baird Raises PT to $340
VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRSN) is included in our list of the 11 Hot Software Stocks to Buy Now. A medical professional demonstrating the use of a Software-Based Prescription Digital Therapeutics Platform for treating Type 2 Diabetes. A day after its earnings release, on July 25, 2025, Baird raised its price target on VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRSN) from $305 to $340, maintaining an 'Outperform' rating. VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRSN)'s EPS, which stood at $2.21 during the quarter, slightly missed the $2.24 consensus. Improving domain registration trends and stronger renewal rates, particularly in Asia-Pacific, resulted in a 5.9% revenue growth, bringing it to $410 million. The company ended the quarter with 170.5 million .com and .net domain names, which is an increase of 660,000 compared to last quarter. Looking ahead, VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRSN) raised its full-year domain base growth outlook to 1.2%-2.0%. Furthermore, during the quarter, the company returned $235 million to shareholders through dividends and buybacks, expanding its repurchase authorization to $1.5 billion. VeriSign maintains its focus on stability and security, as evident from the fact that this year marks 28 consecutive years of 100% DNS availability. For the full year, it expects $1.645-$1.655 billion in revenue and $1.117-$1.127 billion in operating income. VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRSN) delivers critical internet infrastructure, including the .com and .net domain registries. It is included in our list of the hot stocks to buy. While we acknowledge the potential of VRSN as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock. READ NEXT: 13 Best Oil Refinery Stocks to Buy Right Now and 7 Best Potash Stocks to Buy According to Analysts. Disclosure: None. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
31-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How to play software stocks in a shaky macro climate
Sales cycles are starting to stretch as trade pressure adds uncertainty and companies weigh their next artificial intelligence (AI) moves. Steve Koenig, Macquarie head of US technology research, joins Market Domination to explain why he favors Autodesk (ADSK), HubSpot (HUBS), and Atlassian (TEAM) heading into earnings. To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination. Software stocks in focus as IT budgets shrink and a flurry of trade deals up end the macroeconomic landscape, we're navigating how to play the software sector with the Yahoo Finance playbook and joining us now is Steve Koenig, Head of US Technology Research at Macquarie. Steve, great to see you as always. Um, you know, that August 1st trade deadline, it is here, Steve, and you know, you think trade and tariffs and the uncertainty that has created. Have you seen any sort of downstream effects of that in the software sector, Steve, in terms of, um, you know, size of deals or length of time to get deals done? Hi Josh, yeah, great. Thanks for having me on the program. Uh, you know, we do think that there's more uncertainty that enterprise and SMB customers are facing and in some cases it's resulting in longer sales cycles. That's that's happening. Um, but that is accompanied by a a real, um, push by companies to figure out what they need to do with AI, you know, and and whether whether that's using the LLM internally, developing their own retrieval augmented generation use cases, or using the agenti AI functionality being pushed on them by the SAS vendors. And so there are areas of investment that are happening and there's some urgency, uh, on the part of companies to figure out what they're going to do here. So, you know, there there's both headwinds and tailwinds in the current environment. I think in Q1 we we had continued good momentum, kind of a carry over from Q4. I think this quarter, this calendar Q2, the June and July quarters, we're likely to see more separation among companies with the companies that are better positioned as priority investments, uh, doing doing better and then companies that are maybe more legacy or or aren't, uh, whose products are not as much of a priority, not getting as much attention from an investment point of view. Steve, you know, the AI trading trend looks intact here, just based on the earnings reports have been coming in. I'm curious, you know, in your coverage universe, you look at those software names, are there certain names, Steve, that you would say, um, more leveraged to that trend than others? Yeah. Well, we like, uh, three names in particular, especially coming up into these June, July quarter prints. All out perform rated, Autodesk, HubSpot, and Atlassian. Um, and all of those companies have some very interesting AI opportunities. I would say HubSpot and Atlassian, the ticker there is TEAM TEAM. They're both furthest along and applying agenti AI to a variety of use cases. In HubSpot's case, it has a lot to do with marketing content creation and customer services use cases in the customer relationship management space. And for Atlassian, their agenti AI strategy has a lot to do with accelerating the software development life cycle and enhancing collaboration across business teams and across the entire company departments, including CRM and HR. So Autodesk, HubSpot, Atlassian, all buys. If I were to push you, Steve, and say, you know, which is your favorite child? Would you say you have a a strong buy on one of them? You know, we we like all three of these and, um, you know, we we would, you know, we always we always like to, um, especially going into the prints, have several picks that we think, you know, some some are probably going to do well. If we can hit two out of three, we're pretty happy. So so we would advocate, um, you know, going for all of these companies and accumulating now and averaging in. I think Autodesk is very especially interesting because the AI opportunity they have, it's still formative and it's and it's probably underappreciated by investors what they're going to be able to do. Uh, they what they do and product wise, they facilitate essential design work across architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media and entertainment, and their design tools are are the standard basically in all of those industries. Uh, they have an opportunity to apply generative AI to enable product designers and architects and engineers to use text prompts, uh, and to start with an idea for what they want to build or the product they want to create and and then use generative AI to actually create the design. And Autodesk is still, uh, working to make this happening, putting the infrastructure in place. They haven't talked a lot about it, uh, on the outside, but I think over the coming quarters we're going to be hearing a lot more about their AI strategy. All right, so we got your buys. Let's talk about names you're not as excited about. Salesforce, Steve, you're neutral. You're on the sidelines. Why why the lack of excitement there for for Marc Benioff's company? Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, they they deserve a lot of respect, you know, 20 plus years having pioneered the SAS space and, you know, creating the SAS based CRM market, if you will. Um, the last several years though, they've been under a lot of pressure ever since the, um, kind of the the pandemic era spending started to, you know, that that burst of spending started to wind down. They've had headwinds, uh, when it comes to customers that are renewing and customers wanting to spend a lot more money on Salesforce. And you've seen that in terms of their, uh, subscription revenue that the sequential additions to that sequential revenue have been actually falling year on year for the last 10 quarters or so. We think they are coming up probably to an inflection in that as we lap some of these comparisons from the, uh, you know, kind of the post pandemic, uh, you know, spending slowdown. Um, so I think they can start to do better from a revenue production perspective. But I do think, um, there's still some over optimism about their AI strategy, which is a solid strategy, but it's going to take time, especially for the bigger customers to get their data in order and for Salesforce to get its revenue model, uh, associated with its AI products and also its its sales commission model, a lot of operational things to take care of. Lastly, I don't think it was a real positive sign that they have, uh, basically cut off third party, uh, gen AI tools, large language models from accessing slack data, even when customers that are using their slack product want to access that data for for the use in in training or fine tuning models or creating new use cases. And I think that's that looks to us very much like a defensive move by the company. And you know, maybe it's a smart thing in the short term to keep companies like OpenAI and glean out of out of the customer data that they host for their customers. But long term, I think it it it signals sort of a balkanization, you know, kind of a a siloed approach to to making SAS work and that's not what SAS has been about for many, many years. So I don't know if that strategy is really going to work out, uh, long term that well for them. Related Videos Smooth Sailing for Norwegian Cruise We Set Ourselves Up to Thrive in Stable Rate Environment: Sanborn Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol talks Q3 earnings, turnaround strategy Komatsu CFO on US Tariff Impact Sign in to access your portfolio
