One Letter Companies

One letter names are great because they are short and sweet. Last week, I wrote that several one character domain names were being auctioned off, such as a.biz and z.biz. But besides these dot biz names, do you realize that there are only five one letter domains that are owned by companies, and four of the five companies are publicly traded?

These companies were lucky enough to register them before December 1, 1993 (or buy them from someone who registered them by that date), as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority put a restriction on single character domains at that time.

q.com is owned by Qwest Communications International Inc. (Q). This is a 'double single-letter company' because it is also one of the few companies that happens to have a one letter stock ticker symbol. If you go to q.com, it takes you right to Qwest's web site.

x.com is owned by Paypal.com, which is owned by eBay (EBAY). Yet, when you go to the x.com website, it doesn't take you to the Paypal website, it takes you to the Paypal Labs website.

z.com is owned by Nissan North America Inc., which is owned by Nissan Motor (NSANY), which trades on NASDAQ. However, the website is currently inactive.

i.net is owned by Future Media Architects, a privately held company.

u.tv is owned by UTV Media (UTV.L), a broadcasting and New Media company based in Belfast in Northern Ireland. The company trades on the London Stock Exchange.

Want to know all the companies that have one letter stock ticker symbols? Here they are:

Agilent Technologies Inc. (A)
Barnes Group Inc. (B)
Citigroup, Inc. (C) formerly the symbol for Chrysler
Dominion Resources, Inc. (D)
Eni SpA (E)
Ford Motor Co. (F)
Genpact Ltd. (G) formerly the symbol for Gillette
Kellogg Company (K)
Loews Corporation (L)
Macy's, Inc. (M)
NetSuite, Inc. (N)
Realty Income Corp. (O)
Qwest Communications International Inc. (Q)
Ryder System, Inc. (R)
Sprint Nextel Corp. (S) formerly the symbol for Sears Roebuck
AT&T, Inc. (T)
Visa, Inc. (V)
United States Steel Corp. (X)
Alleghany Corp. (Y)

By the way, the ticker symbol Z used to be used by the five-and-dime retailer Woolworth, now known as Foot Locker (FL). Also, before US Airways Group was delisted, it used to have the stock symbol U.

By Fred Fuld at Stockerblog.com