Once again, Network Solutions Inc enjoyed the fruits of a monopoly in the domain name registration business to boost its gross margins to more than 50%. The Herndon, Virginia company had the exclusive contract from the US government to register top- level domains in the .com, .net and .org space. The contract, which was awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) five years ago actually expired at the end of the first quarter and is now in a six month transition period during which competitors are to be appointed to open up the process. But until the US government sets in place a non-profit corporation to appoint to new registrars, NSI is still on its own. NSI reported first quarter net profits up to $2.0m, from $516,000 last time, on revenues that rose 91% to $16.5m. Net earnings per share $0.13 per share in the quarter, which according to Zacks Investment Research is two cents better than the Street was looking for. During the quarter it registered 340,000 new names, a 73% rise on the same quarter last year. That helped to bring the cumulative total to 1.86 million at the end of the quarter, up from 1.54 million at the end of 1997. The number of international registration rose to 98,000 in the quarter, up 165% year-on-year. During the quarter the company launched its RegistrationPlus value-added service and after the quarter acquired idNames to give it access to the two latter country-specific domains, such as .us, .uk and .jp.
