Tucows 2015 Annual Report Download - page 12

Seasonality
During the summer months and certain other times of the year, such as major holidays, Internet usage often
declines. As a result, many of our services (OpenSRS, Hover and Ting) may experience reduced demand during these
times. For example, our experience shows that new domain registrations decline during the summer months and around the
year-end holidays. Seasonality may also affect advertising, which may have a slight impact on advertisement-based
revenue. These seasonal effects could cause fluctuations in our financial results.
Competition
Our competitors may be divided into the following groups:
• US Mobile Phone Service providers such as AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint, who primarily compete with
Ting Mobile Services.
• Retail-oriented domain registrars, such as GoDaddy and Web.com who compete with our Reseller customers in
Wholesale Domain Services and with Hover.
• Wholesale-oriented domain registrars, such as Rightside and Melbourne IT, who market services to resellers
such as our customers.
• Wholesale Email Service providers, such as Google, Microsoft, Bluetie and MailTrust.
We expect to continue to experience significant competition from the competitors identified above and, as our
business continues to develop, we expect to encounter competition from other providers. Service providers, Internet
portals, web hosting companies, email hosting companies, outsourced application companies, country code registries and
major telecommunication firms may broaden their services to include services we offer.
We believe the primary competitive factors in our Domain Services are:
• Providing superior customer service by anticipating the technical requirements and business objectives of
resellers and providing them with technical advice to help them understand how our services can be customized
to meet their particular needs;
• Providing cost savings over in-house solutions by relieving resellers of the expense of acquiring and maintaining
hardware and software and the associated administrative burden;
• Enabling resellers to better manage their relationships with their end-users;
• Facilitating scalability through an infrastructure designed to support millions of transactions across millions of
end-users; and
• Providing superior technology and infrastructure, consisting of industry-leading software and hardware that
allow resellers to provide these services to their customers without having to make substantial investments in
their own software or hardware.
Although we encounter pricing pressure in many markets in which we compete, we believe the effects of that
pressure are mitigated by the fact that we deliver a high degree of value to our customers through our business and
technical practices. We believe our status as a trusted supplier also allows us to mitigate the effects of this type of
competition. We believe that the long-term relationships we have made with many customers results in a sense of certainty
that would not be available to those customers through a competitor.
Employees
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