Faith in the future

A good year

2018 was a good year for DNS Belgium. In 2018 there were slightly fewer registrations of new domain names than we had estimated. On the other hand, the number of renewals exceeded our estimates, which means our revenues were still in line with expectations.

Our costs are predictable. This means that, as in previous years, we had them well under control in 2018 and they were completely in line with what we had budgeted. Good income and controlled costs ensured that we generated a nice profit. The fact that we are doing this year after year results in a nice growth of our cash flow. This makes DNS Belgium a financially very healthy organisation.

Apart from the financial aspects, we remember a number of good operational achievements in 2018, of which we are rightly proud. 

Sustainability

• Our ambitious climate programme, our zero carbon footprint efforts and the efforts to reduce and compensate our CO2emissions - including historic emissions - were rewarded by VOKA. In 2018, DNS Belgium was nominated as climate ambassador for Flemish Brabant. 
• In 2018, we renewed our website. It is now completely AnySurfer-compliant. It means our website is also accessible to poor-sighted, (colour) blind, elderly people and disabled or impaired people. 

Security

• From 1 December 2018, in collaboration with the FPS Economy, we are able to take fraudulent websites offline within 24 hours without having to go through a lengthy procedure. Together we ensure that consumers can trust .be websites 100 percent.
• Because DNS Belgium values privacy, we are of course GDPR-compliant. As administrator of .be, .vlaanderen and .brussels domain names, this means that since 2018 we show even fewer personal data when you look up who is behind a certain domain name. 

Health and safety at work

• The mental and physical health of our employees is important to us. That's why in 2018 we organised a fit@work programme with voluntary fitness measurements for our people. Programme participants were given a fitbit watch and access to a platform to set their own goals and track their results. Participants receive regular challenges of the fit@work-coach within DNS Belgium.
• With a view to the continuous coaching of our employees, we launched a number of new procedures. This coaching replaces conventional evaluations and comprises a personal – and completely voluntary – training plan and budget. 

Customer trust and cyber security

• Since 2010 - then as a pioneer inour sector - we take our responsibility to screen and ‘cancel’ our registrations on a daily basis when the registration information is not reliable enough.  
• Since 2013, building customer trust has been high on DNS Belgium's agenda. Despite our already considerable attention for security, DNS Belgium will focus even more on cybersecurity in 2019.
• In addition, as an organisation we will of course continue to aim for operational excellence and invest in our ongoing search for greater efficiency. 
• Sustainability in the broad sense of the word remains an important objective in 2019 of course. Our greatest focus lies on supporting and stimulating digital society and in particular youngsters, among others, via CoderDojo, Child Focus, Ava & Trix, etc. 

Staff

At the end of 2018, DNS Belgium employed 32 workers. At the beginning of 2018, we offered a permanent contract to a temporary employee in the customer support department and in the course of 2018, we also hired an additional worker for external relations. The population within the other departments remained stable, although we realised that an expansion of the engineering team is necessary for 2019 in the context of R&D.