D. James Bidzos
Chairman of the Board & Chief Executive Officer at VeriSign
Thanks, David, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm pleased to report another solid quarter of operational and financial performance for Verisign. During the quarter, we continued to deliver strong financial results while maintaining, investing in and evolving our critical internet infrastructure and complying with the high operational standards required by our ICANN agreements. Our critical infrastructure enables us to reliably and accurately provide the domain name system navigation service, which people around the world depend on for commerce, education, health care and person-to-person connection. During the third quarter, we processed 10.7 million new registrations, and the domain name base increased by 1.48 million names. At the end of September, the domain name base in.com and.net totaled 172.1 million, consisting of 158.6 million names for.com and 13.5 million names for.net. with a year-over-year growth rate of 5.1%. Although renewal rates are not fully measurable until 45 days after the end of the quarter, we believe that the renewal rate for the third quarter of 2021 will be approximately 75%.
This preliminary rate compares to 73.7% achieved in the third quarter of 2020 and 75.4% last quarter. For the full year 2021, we now expect a domain name base growth rate of between 4.7% and 5.5%. This narrower range reflects the current pace of new additions to the base and our outlook for the remainder of the year. Our financial and liquidity position remained stable with $1.2 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities at the end of the quarter. Share repurchases during the third quarter totaled $172 million for 785,000 shares. At quarter end, $565 million remained available and authorized under the current share repurchase program, which has no expiration. We continually evaluate the overall liquidity and investing needs of the business and consider the best uses for our cash, including potential share repurchases. As it relates to.web, and as we stated last quarter, after the final IRP decision was issued in May, Afilias filed in June an application requesting that the IRP panel interpret and amend its final decision.
The briefing on this application was completed in September, and the panel has now taken the matter under advisement without oral argument, which means we're just waiting for the IRP panel to respond. Verisign believes Afilias' application is without merit, and we continue to expect the panel to rule on it in the fourth quarter of 2021. As we have said before, we continue to look forward to becoming the.web registry operator and establishing it as an additional option for businesses and individual end users worldwide. And now I'd like to turn the call over to George.